Why were people protesting Google doing business with a democracy, and nobody is protesting Apple obeying to a dictatorship?
If any company wants to do business in China they have to deal with strict CCP censorship.
Sure you could argue that Apple should SCT on principle and just leave the Chinese market, but play that strategy out to the end. We would have every company moving towards only doing business in their home country. I don't expect that's what most people in the west want and when anything related to tariffs, onshoring manufacturing, etc comes up it gets thrown out as nationalist BS (or MAGA if you're in the US).
they literally block any discussion on things like... you know, democracy movements.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/south-bay/protests-exp...
[0] Nation-state Law Essentially Establishes Apartheid Regime - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-12-22/ty-article-op...
Indeed, but why should Western countries allow Chinese companies access to our markets when China offers absolutely zero reciprocity?
It's one thing to operate in an economic/political sphere that shares a reasonable set of common political and economic values, and deal with the relatively tiny differences (tax codes, data protection laws, content moderation, advertising restrictions, ...). Hell even with larger differences (EU GDPR vs US laissez-faire), US megacorps can still freely operate in Europe.
In contrast, it's a completely different thing to operate in China - either you are outright banned (Meta, Twitter, Google, ...) or you have to have a corporate entity where the foreign party must be below 50% ownership, and in some cases you have to install a parallel governance structure of the CCP [1].
[1] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...
Money.
China knows that the only thing the west (and arguably humanity) ultimately cares about is wealth, and so China's playing that game far better than anyone else. We are literally funding our own demise, hoisting our own petards, hitching our own nooses.
I find the coming Pax Sino era terrifying and how well they play the world like a flute astonishing.
And then there are others like BASF or Volkswagen, who already showed bad decisionmaking in Russia, who now double down on China. Complete and utter madness - it's time for politics to step in here.