Apparently, China wields strong influence over Amazon, even ordering it to censor posts that are critical of Xi Jinping. This article by Vlad Savov is published by Bloomberg. Here is an excerpt:

Amazon.com Inc.’s efforts to curry favor with the Chinese government included quieting criticism of President Xi Jinping’s book on its Chinese outlet, according to a Reuters report.

The Amazon.cn entry for Xi’s “The Governance of China” had its ratings, comments and reviews scrubbed and disabled roughly two years ago in response to an edict from Beijing, the report said. Triggering the request were reviews rating the work at less than the maximum five stars, according to one of the unidentified people familiar with the incident.

The move was part of a broader campaign to ensure that Amazon could carry on with business in the world’s most populous country, where its Kindle and cloud computing operations had room to grow. By 2018, the company was receiving an “increasing number of requests from (Chinese) watchdogs to take down certain content, mostly politically sensitive ones,“ according to an internal briefing document cited by Reuters.

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