Stop sucking up to dictatorships. If they don't want to do business with you because your map or flags or search engine shows something they don't like - leave. Don't censor your search engine or modify your maps to fit their worldview.
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Yea they want to head back (now that they realize nobody cared), but they pulled out of China entirely back in 2011 over censorship.
The truth is, these companies were never competitive in China because they never put in the work. Established western companies are not use to the level of competition in China. It's simplistic to say CCP is just arbitrarily picking domestic winners. Thousands of domestic companies (as in the case with ecommerce going toe-to-toe with Amazon) were busy out competing each other and western challengers. When it came to western social media bans post 2007, Chinese companies were hiring tens of thousands of content moderators with understanding of Chinese filtering rules for compliance. Western companies simply gave up and didn't learn how to scale content moderation until the last few years when social media had to deal with the same violent extremism that China did during the Tibetan and XinJiang riots that lead to FB/Twitter ban. As evidenced by current Youtube debacles, Google still can't / refuse to get human content control right. BTW both these companies can reenter anytime as long as they conform the same rules like Bing. Regardless, the government didn't have to tip the scale much to crown a domestic champion over western companies.
See AI Superpowers by Lee Fu Lee,previous head of Google.cn for an overview of Chinese competitive environments. There's lots of extremely technical fields where China is actively conducting industrial espionage and coercing tech transfers in (IC, airplane engines, military stuff). But cloning and improving software is not really one of them.
That being said, many companies fail to establish a foot-hold in certain international markets, including Yelp, Uber (which ceded southeast Asia to Grab, and China to Didi). Even Amazon does poorly internationally, and that's headed by the richest man on earth (which by your logic implies that it's impossible for Amazon not be able to dominate)[1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c...
I will gladly agree that Chinese companies have a competitive advantage over Western companies in terms of enforcing state-mandated censorship. I hope Western companies never get comfortable with that particular competency.
First of all, I don't want them to do "human content control". That is stupid.
I will happily concede that China is better at nightmarish Orwellian censorship policies, congratulations, big accomplishment. I hope America never catches up.
How uncivilized must China be, if they need an army of censors to edit what everyone says? Americans have gotten along well without that. Based on how Chinese government treats its people, you must conclude that Chinese people are monsters that are constantly plotting violence. I choose to believe that the Chinese government is just too authoritarian and controlling.
Any American corporation that kowtows to the Chinese government's demands has nothing to be proud of.
It should be illegal for American companies to facilitate the evil that the PRC government commits. I don't want Google making money sending ethnic minorities to "re-education" camps.
But the fact remains, the Chinese model promises political serenity (i.e. recent revelation of TikTok guidelines against divisive politics) which is valued in unstable countries without strong institutions, and those countries are by far the majority out the ~200 countries around the world. You many not like it, but calls for Social media accountability is obviously also happening all across western liberal democracies, including the US. People are screaming for more censorship. Techniques are converging and the only reason IMO the west can't match Chinese mechanical turk censoring is labour costs, but I surmise gig economy will eventually figure out a way to source the headcount.
This is a hard pill to swallow for western minds that hedges softpower on moral superiority. Many westerners refuse to accept that the CPC is modelling it's evil development method after what has been successful in the west, i.e. all the industrial espionage and protectionism, even the current Uyghur situation (which I do not endorse) is result of 2nd generation ethnic policy directly based off US melting pot concept and not far from indigenous residential school systems that emphasis integration. Previously it was based on autonomous soviet oblasts that tried to make distinct ethnic identities work - salad bowl - that has failed after riots and terrorism caused by unrestrained western social media (hence the bans). China will happily copy outdated, evil strategies employed by the west if it provides serenity, don't be surprised when the west copies fresh, evil Chinese innovations to address their social ills as well.
Different nations have different ways of doing things. The policies that they have in China might indeed be the best thing for them. But the only time I care is when American corporations start trying to do that.
I can not disagree about the Uyghur question. The melting pot policy is stupid and must end anyway because it will fail, as we are seeing in Europe. Hopefully it will burn itself out before too much damage is done. I actually feel guilty that these stupid immigration/integration concepts have been exported to other countries.
Calls within the United States for censorship are just flimsy pretexts for consolidation of power, and actually I think are less sincere than Chinese efforts for harmony. Mass shootings and other evils would not be significantly hampered by censorship. People saying that the internet has caused the rise of extremist terrorism are absolutely wrong. Just the last few weeks they kept going on and on about chaos that would happen from the Joker movie. It is nonsense. It is very hard to connect things said on the Internet to any real world deaths here. But I can see how in less stable countries, rumors and misinformation could lead to real problems. Maybe in a place like Indonesia or The Philippines they should censor misinformation, when there is a very real chance of conflict breaking out.
Despite continuous friction with the Chinese government, Google's share of the search engine market in China had grown to over a third before it decided to pull out: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703465204575207...
Google hasn't pulled out of other markets where it faces strong local competitors, such as Yandex in Russia, and it remains popular in Chinese-speaking markets outside of mainland China such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. That the developers of the Google Pinyin input tool were found to have copied data (something other companies in and out of China have also been guilty of from time to time) is hardly evidence that Google in general was not competitive.
Ironically, the fact that under Pichai a return to China was seriously contemplated would suggest that financial reasons alone can't explain the original decision to leave.
Similarly, YouTube wasn't forced to pull out of other markets where it faced competition. Also, YouTube was frequently blocked by Chinese authorities even before Google decided to pull out: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703465204575207...
Competition may explain in part why Google hadn't conquered the Chinese market before it left, but conflict with the Chinese government, in the form of official censorship as well as illicit hacking, would seem to be the main reason why Google pulled out of China but not elsewhere.
Unless of course learning to comply with such demands and intrusions is included under "understanding the Chinese market".