Friday news agency Reuters He published an investigation that Amazon China has canceled book reviews of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Based on what was said without revealing his identity a Reuters From two people familiar with the facts, about two years ago, Amazon had received a request from the Chinese government to delete all comments and reviews from a collection of Xi’s writings and letters, published in Italy with the title “rule china“, disable the possibility of a new write.

The government’s request could have come after a negative review was posted (one source says everything will be due to a review with less than five stars, the highest rating that can be attributed to a product on Amazon). Reuters He writes that currently on the Chinese Amazon website, which is not accessible from Italy, Xi Jinping’s book will not have any reviews, and the comments section will be disabled.

Reuters It shows how the option to opt out of reviews strongly contradicts Amazon’s marketing policies, which largely base their ability to attract new customers on consumer ratings and feedback. Secondly Reuters So this decision should be seen as part of a “ten-year” strategy by multinational Jeff Bezos to avoid Chinese government retaliation, as has often happened to various tech companies in recent years, and to maintain competition in one of its most important markets. In the world.

about this, Reuters He writes that he was able to read a classified Amazon document from 2018, in which the company allegedly spoke of the use of propaganda by the Chinese government as a key tool for success in the Communist Party. In the document, Amazon had added that it did not want to judge “whether this is true or false.”

Based on this document and interviews with more than twenty people who have participated in Amazon’s operations in China, Reuters He writes that the company will continue to succeed in the country “by helping to advance the global economic and political agenda of the ruling Communist Party,” and occasionally rejecting some government requests. Among the Amazon initiatives that were supposed to be implemented specifically to attract the interests of the Chinese government, there will be China Books, a section of the US Amazon website that opened in 2019 and dedicated to Chinese books.

The department is allegedly created in cooperation with the Chinese propaganda apparatus, and secondly Reuters It will only sell books that reflect the views of the Chinese government. In one of the books for sale, for example, life in Xinjiang was glorified: in the book it is said that there are no ethnic conflicts there, when the international community has repeatedly denounced human rights violations committed against the ethnic minority. from the Uyghurs.

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