Maybe there's a middleground? You've still got to pick your battles and understand the scope of them. It's also entirely reasonable for a company to not to choose to follow a particular fight because it's too expensive or would have to much of an impact on the strategy of the company.
If a company decides to not fund healthcare for everyone in the US, even if that aligned with their values and CSR, there's no need to take a cynical look at that.
So they should have just defied the Chinese government, had all their manufacturing facilities cut off, and just closed up shop and called it a day?
Of course they don't agree with it, but they don't have the power to effectively ignore their demands right now. Yes, this sucks, but it means they get to live and fight another day, hopefully when they do have a bargaining chip.
What's missing here is context. The reason we are seeing a spate of similar news on this is because China recently changed the law, and so companies are making sure they comply with the law as a first step before figuring out further strategies.
Now maybe they take no further steps, but it's unreasonable to expect companies to entirely end their entire China operations based on a new law whose implications are not fully understood.
Instead they are making sure they are in compliance and seeing the specifics of what that entails before deciding what if anything to do next.
Apple's been 'aiding Chinese censorship' in hundreds of ways to the tune of billions of dollars for well over a decade and you were ok with it all until they took VPN's off the app store? Lol.
"We're" already in trouble. Just like HN commenters wisely advise not to build your company on top of someone else's service, the entire planet has built their service on China's manufacturing. The thinking (if there even was any, I personally doubt it) was that we'd just use them for labor intensive but low intellectual assembly work, but it seems no one considered if China was happy to continue being the servant of the West indefinitely.
China seems like a country happy to play the long game, but I don't think they're even going to have to.
Amazon's Cloud services aren't made in China - it's the Chinese market they want, not Chinese factories. China depends on foreign markets for its factories output, but generally isn't as keen on having its (huge) market buying foreign goods and services. Having saturated their other markets, Western companies are desperate to tap into China to keep their growth numbers.
> Western companies are desperate to tap into China to keep their growth numbers
Yes they are, and China isn't stupid enough to allow that, and there's nothing the west can do about it without sinking the ship they are in. With the west being a democracy with most major decisions being made by individual corporations, to me it looks like a near certain checkmate for China, provided they don't have something like a major financial crisis.
If a company decides to not fund healthcare for everyone in the US, even if that aligned with their values and CSR, there's no need to take a cynical look at that.