1) Operating there helps support a repressive regime that often uses the tools and services of foreign companies to facilitate that repression. I don't think a refusal to operate there is censorship, and if you do, that is a broad enough definition of censorship that the Montgomery Bus Boycott would also fall into that category.
2) It is also a bad long-term business decision. Between forced IP transfer, IP theft, piracy, and enormous subsidies for home-grown competitors, most companies are not truly growing in an emerging market, they are filling a short term gap until China can replace them with their own alternatives, bootstrapped by those short term interactions with foreign companies. At that point, it is happy to expand those homegrown options out to the rest of the world, bootstrapped by not having to make the same R&D investments, complete with its repressive values embedded in the products & services.
China is not truly interested being a partner country on the world stage. It's implicit and explicit goals are self sufficiency in service of not needing to even pretend it respects anything but its own power. This is revealed every time there's a Bing "accident" or another actor is made to embarrass themselves in kowtowing to China, or a movie changes a Tibetan character to anything but Tibetan, or a Hotel corporation like Marriot is forced offline in China until it similarly embarrasses itself.
China's goal is to have enough power to forced anyone that interacts with it to adopt its own repressive values.
Now at this point in the conversation someone will say "What about the things the US does"?
To which I respond:
1) That's irrelevant to the issue of China. Whatever the US does isn't an excuse to allow China to get away with things, and other countries and corporations are free to avoid dealing with the US in the same way I advocate they avoid China.
2) That's a false equivalence. The US may do objectionable things. But when it comes to repression of it's population, at it's worst levels of privacy intrusion it still gives it's citizens more freedom by an order if magnitude than does China.
Any company that does this for content in China, but "only" in China raises serious doubts when they say they are not doing it anywhere else. If you add this ability, it will be misused/abused either by "rogue" employees, being hacked, or being forced to by gov't because of "terrorism" or "the kids".
They can add this ability at any point anyway because putting a phrase into a word filter takes about 10 minutes I guess.
What is the logical alternative here, every American company leaves every other market because they have differing censorship laws? How is that helping anyone else?
There are plenty of good reasons to refuse to cede to CCP demands but this makes no sense.
The only tech company that were able to mount serious resistance against a serious data access request by the US government were Apple and a couple of things:
1. They are a trillion dollar company.
2. They are primarily a hardware company, not a cloud services company
3. There is no guarantee (and I would argue rather unlikely) that if the FBI were unable to break the encryption of that phone independently that they would not have kept mounting pressure on Apple till they cracked.
It's a complete fantasy to believe that any individual or company has guaranteed data protection in the US or indeed most nation states. Once the government really want your data, they will get it with enough time.
* Now, I'm definitely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the truth is that every government has power to order around any corporation that wants to do business in its border. The difference is how much you agree with each particular government, not whether they do it or not.
It lets the Chinese Communist Party pretend their citizens don't live in a curated bubble designed to reinforce feelings of nationalism and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Some Chinese are allowed to travel abroad. If they discovered a totally different Internet abroad, they might start asking uncomfortable questions back home. Instead, CCP bosses hope that they simply won't notice that the domestic Bing isn't the same as Bing everywhere else.
I am quite sure that Chinese people travelling abroad are 100% familiar with what they should not talk or write about once they get home.
https://apnews.com/article/europe-china-dubai-middle-east-he...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute
Also, they tend to have family back home that can be pressured.