How Amazon grew its business in China, including partnering with a government propaganda arm for a books section on Amazon US, AWS-related concessions, and more
Welcome to the 97th edition of Trade War. — As we near our 100th edition … Msmash / Slashdot : Amazon Partnered With China Propaganda Arm Tweets: Neeraj K. Agrawal / @neerajka : Amazon removed all reviews in China because Xi's book was receiving anything less than 5 star reviews. Amazon said it “complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception.” https://www.cnbc.com/... Alice Su / @aliceysu : Fantastic @Reuters reporting on how Amazon bent over backwards to sell kindle & cloud services in China, including by promoting Xi's books as “best sellers,” censoring reviews of propaganda films & providing a dissident's IP address to authorities https://www.reuters.com/... @uyghur_american : Amazon promoted the books genocidal dictator XiJinping, the man who ordered #UyghurGenocide, as “best sellers” Another example of disgusting corporate greed. https://twitter.com/... @dhakatribune : Amazon's compliance with the Chinese government edict, which has not been reported before, is part of a deeper, decade-long effort by the company to win favor in Beijing to protect and grow its business in one of the world's largest marketplaces @amazon https://www.dhakatribune.com/ ... Good Wolf Hunting / @_woifgang : using amazon reviews of Xi's book to voice my discontent https://twitter.com/... Jeff Roberts / @jeffjohnroberts : Amazon giving FB a run for its money as most amoral tech company—pulls any negative reviews of tyrant Xi's writing. https://www.cnbc.com/... William Yang / @williamyang120 : “In a core element of this strategy, the internal document and interviews show, Amazon partnered with an arm of China's propaganda apparatus to create a selling portal on the company's U.S. site, https://amazon.com/ - a project that came to be known as China Books.” @the_iap : It's far past time we recognize our Big Tech overlords are not patriots. They are amoral globalists who will sell out their country for profit without a second thought. Break. Them. Up. https://twitter.com/... Tim Graham / @timjgraham : Amazon puts democracy in darkness. https://twitter.com/... Kenneth Roth / @kenroth : The Chinese government is so terrified of giving a voice to its repressed people that it insisted Amazon disable its rating system and comments for Xi Jinping's book for anyone within China. https://www.reuters.com/... https://twitter.com/... Gady Epstein / @gadyepstein : Very interesting story on Amazon's dealings in China. This jumped out at me: “the company asked Guo [Wengui] to take an action that exposed the dissident's...IP address, and AWS ‘provided to [Ministry of Public Security]’ this data, the document stated” https://www.reuters.com/... Oren Cass / @oren_cass : Feels like only last week I was doing a panel discussion at George Mason University with panelists who argued that using antitrust law to limit the market power of companies like Amazon would harm national security. Wait, it was last week! https://twitter.com/... Eric Garland / @ericgarland : Shocked, I tells ya. https://www.reuters.com/... Rachel Bovard / @rachelbovard : Amazon won't sell @RyanTAnd's book because critiquing modern transgender theory is “hate speech,” but Amazon will bend over backwards to push the preferences of a genocidal Chinese authoritarian regime. Got it. https://twitter.com/... William Nee / @williamnee : This whole article is amazing, but one shocking bit: “AWS's China business continues to grow..AWS has landed key customers in China, say people familiar with the matter. Among them are two Chinese companies, Tiktok developer ByteDance and video-surveillance firm #Hikvision” https://twitter.com/... Edward Lawrence / @ep_lawrence : Some brilliant digging here form Reuters. Amongst other things, it handed off cloud services to a local company and provided the IP address of a dissident to China's Ministry of Public Security 👇 https://twitter.com/... Steve Kopack / @stevekopack : “Amazon partnered with an arm of China's propaganda apparatus to create a selling portal on the company's U.S. site...” and documents show “that it was seen by Amazon as crucial to winning support in China as the company grew” various businesses there https://t.co/w7IOUq88hl
Context & Ripple Effects
The Reuters investigation lands after years of scattered signals about how far Amazon would go to keep its China business alive: it removed reviews of Xi Jinping's books inside China, built a 'China Books' portal on its U.S. site with an arm of the state propaganda apparatus, and routed AWS operations through a local Chinese cloud partner. The most sensitive disclosure is that AWS supplied the IP address of dissident Guo Wengui to China's Ministry of Public Security.
The piece also reads against Amazon's domestic record: the same quarter saw reporting on [[a:973148|internal documents showing Amazon's lobbying killed or undermined privacy bills across 25 states]], and earlier coverage documented how AWS is easy to migrate onto but hard to leave — meaning customers who joined for ByteDance- or Hikvision-scale reach now sit inside a platform whose governance choices they cannot easily exit.
First-order effects
- AWS's marquee Chinese customers — ByteDance and Hikvision per the report — are anchored to a cloud operation that has already handed user-identifying data to the Ministry of Public Security, while U.S. shoppers browsing the propaganda co-produced China Books section see state-curated titles promoted as best sellers.
- Amazon's own statement that it 'complies with all applicable laws and regulations' in China puts the review-stripping of Xi's book and the Guo Wengui handoff formally inside its compliance posture rather than at arm's length.
Second-order effects
- Rival U.S. cloud providers eyeing China-adjacent workloads now face the same menu of concessions — local partners, data disclosures, content compliance — making AWS's decade-long concession trail the de facto price list for market access.
- Western enterprises weighing AWS contracts gain a new diligence question layered on top of existing lock-in concerns, and U.S. lawmakers already primed by the state privacy-bill lobbying exposé have a concrete case study linking Amazon's overseas compliance to its domestic influence playbook.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, access to China's market functions as a standing test of whether U.S. platforms will operationalize state censorship and surveillance requests abroad — with each concession normalizing the next, and the WhatsApp prosecution coverage showing what the surveillance apparatus does with the data such systems surface.
- Structurally, the story points toward a bifurcated internet economy where multinational platforms run differentiated governance regimes per jurisdiction, forcing regulators in Washington and Brussels to decide whether export-grade compliance standards should constrain what those platforms do at home.
The trend: U.S. platform companies are increasingly pricing market access to China in censorship, data-disclosure, and partnership concessions, turning compliance departments into instruments of state policy on both sides of the Pacific.