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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I just love that in the minds of Westerners, 'Chinese company does X' is the equivalent of 'China does X', and when queried on why they think this, they'll tell you that Xi Jinping, like Oz the Great Wizard, pulls the levers of more than a billion Chinese individuals from behind the curtain.

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This is a pretty dismissive exaggeration of people's thoughts. China does, famously, control businesses. It doesn't have to be absolute dictation of every decision to warrant suspicion.

All companies in China are under control of the CCP so it's the same thing. The "West" isn't an authoritarian state so this might be why people think of it like this.

I have to ask you - do you have substantial firsthand experience on how businesses operate in China or are you just 'well read' on the subject?

A bit hard to find open, unbiased, and independent information about a country that forcibly suppresses anything negative about itself, isn't it? Jack Ma criticized the government and suddenly disappeared for years losing his position at the company in the process. If they can do that to one of the most powerful people in the country, they can do it to anyone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#Disappearance_from_the...

Jack Ma never disappeared though, same case with the Chinese Tenis player. Thats the exact same thing the other poster was criticizing. Its the western media making up stories to fit the anti-china narrative.

Just like nothing happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Peng_Shuai

The very first sentence of that Wikipedia article is incorrect (it takes an extremely obtuse reading of Peng Shuai's social media post to construe it as an accusation of sexual assault), so I don't have high hopes for the accuracy of the rest of the article.

Wikipedia is good for many things, but not for hot-button political topics. Those sorts of pages are usually written by politically motivated editors, so you're seeing whatever spin the dominant group of editors at that page wants you to see.

It's not at all difficult to find open, unbiased, independent information about China. You could apply for a visa right now, travel there, and talk to people yourself. It's not difficult. This isn't the Mao era any more.

To be fair, it basically is, you won't get very far in China without the CCP's approval.

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