15-20 years ago I naively thought that many of the Big Tech companies would stand against this type of censorship. Sadly I was wrong and didn’t understand how important it was to have access to the Chinese market and the importance of China’s low-cost manufacturing for these companies as well. Today, the Big Tech companies might not actively support this kind of censorship, but they aren’t aggressively working agains…
It's not just access to the Chinese consumer market; almost every Apple device is manufactured in China, too. China has jurisdiction over the factories that make virtually everything that powers the US economy.
As time goes by it’s going to become clearer and clearer that selling out western manufacturing to exploit cheap Chinese labour - a project endorsed and embraced by both major parties in Washington - was the single worst decision in the history of liberal democracy. It’s hollowed out both middle America and the American middle class, and instead of bringing democracy to China as Neo-liberals predicted, it’s instead enabled and is leading to the hegemony of the largest and most powerful totalitarian regime mankind’s ever known.