Jeffrey Dastin & Steve Stecklow

LONDON (Reuters – Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ 🙂 had been marketing a compilation of President Xi Jinping’s writings and speeches on its Chinese website around two years before Beijing handed down an edict. American giant e-commerce must end allowing customers to rate and review products in China.

According to one person, the demand was triggered by a negative review about Xi’s book. According to the second person, “I don’t think that the issue received anything less than five stars,” the best rating under Amazon’s 5-point system.

Amazon’s online e-commerce site is a key part. Reviews and ratings are an important way to get shoppers engaged. The two individuals said that Amazon did comply. Amazon.cn currently has the book published by China but no reviews nor ratings. Comment section disabled.

Amazon’s compliance in China with the Chinese government’s edict is part of a decade-long, more complex effort to get favors in Beijing, to preserve and grow its businesses in one of the most important markets in the world.

A 2018 Amazon internal briefing document describes Amazon’s China operations and highlights the “Core Issues” that the Seattle-based company has encountered in China. They include: The “Ideological Control and Propaganda is the heart of the toolkit that the communist Party must use to attain and sustain its success,” it states. It is not our intention to judge whether the decision was right or wrong.

This briefing document and interviews with over two dozen individuals involved in Amazon’s China operations reveal how Amazon has survived and prospered in China. They have helped to advance the global political and economic agenda of the ruling Communist Party, sometimes pushing back against government requests.

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, Amazon.com – a project that came to be known as China Books. The venture – which eventually offered more than 90,000 publications for sale – hasn’t generated significant revenue. However, the document shows Amazon viewed it as vital to winning Chinese support as they grew their Kindle electronic-book and cloud-computing businesses.

Jay Carney is the global head for Amazon’s public-policy operations and lobbying. The briefing documents 2018 outline the strategic stakes in the China Books project. It was prepared before he traveled to Beijing. According to the briefing document, “Kindle was operating in China within a policy gray area” and that Amazon was facing difficulties obtaining a licence to sell e books in China.

According to the document, “The Chinabooks project is the key element that will protect against the Chinese government’s license problems with them.”

In the document, it was also mentioned that Amazon.com/China’s books project also has wide acceptance among Chinese regulators.

LIFE IN XINJIANG

There are many titles that can be considered apolitical, like Chinese language books and cookbooks. However, they include titles that reinforce the Communist Party’s official line.

One book celebrates life in Xinjiang. United Nations specialists have stated that China has held one million Uyghur ethnic Uyghurs inside a network camp. The book – “Incredible Xinjiang: Stories of Passion and Heritage” – discusses an online comedy show situated in the region. An actor portraying a Uyghur country bumpkin says that ethnicity “is not a problem” in the book. This is in line with Beijing’s position, which denies mistreating minorities.

Some books tell the story of China’s victory over the COVID-19 pandemic. It began in Wuhan (China), and ended in heroic terms. The title of one is “Stories of Courage and Determination: Wuhan under Coronavirus Lockdown.” One begins with comment from Xi. “Our success thus far has once again proven the strength of CPC’s leadership and Chinese socialistism,”

China International Book Trading Corp., a state-owned business that is partnering with Amazon for China books, stated to Reuters that this venture was a “commercial relationship” between two businesses. China’s National Press and Publication Administration or NPPA was not available for comment. This is the propaganda arm that Amazon has partnered with.

Amazon responded to queries by stating that it adheres to all laws and regulations in China and other countries. The company stated, “As a bookeller, we believe it’s important to provide access to the written words and different perspectives.” Even books which some people may not like.

Amazon claimed it had a “large selection of Chinese books”, and that the China Books portal was “an additional channel to serve our Chinese customers in America and around the world.” CIBTC is one of millions of global selling partners that we have available products for sale in our stores.

The new details about Amazon’s China strategy demonstrate the challenges Western companies face in accessing the world’s most populous market – and in coping with an authoritarian regime that has been tightening control over public discourse.

China’s compromised approach to the company contrasts its attempts to skirt regulators in these two biggest democracies. Reuters in India has this year documented the ways Amazon evaded local laws and rigged search results to its Indian site. Reuters in the United States detailed how Amazon destroyed or murdered state privacy laws designed to protect consumers.

Amazon claimed that the company has always followed Indian laws and it doesn’t show its private-label products as search results. The company stated that the United States is its preferred privacy legislation and it does not sell or share data.

Some companies responded to Beijing by leaving the China market. Yahoo! recently left China. Microsoft Corp LinkedIn (NASDAQ:) announced that it will be discontinuing some services. Both companies mentioned the difficulties of working in the country as well as regulatory regulations.

Amazon is a different story. In recent years it has become a major economic player in China. This includes providing export opportunities for thousands Chinese businesses and growing its industry-leading cloud services unit. According to a recent report by iResearch China and AWS employees, Amazon Web Services (or AWS) is one of the top providers of Chinese businesses worldwide.

According to the Carney briefing document, Amazon still received “increasing numbers of requests from (Chinese] watchdogs [to take down certain content], mostly politically sensitive ones.” Prior to that, he was communications director at the U.S. president Joe Biden. Biden was also vice president.

Amazon did not make Carney available to interview.

The briefing documents states that in 2018, the Cyberspace Administration of China or (also known as ), asked Amazon to delete a “link” to China’s blockbuster film Amazing China due to extremely negative user reviews. Online security and regulation are the responsibility of the CAC.

The “Amazing China” section praises China’s achievements since Xi was elected president in 2013. CAC requested that the link be removed from IMDb (Amazon-owned site of film information, reviews and other movie information).

CAC was informed by Amazon’s China Office that Amazon China is unable to fulfill such requests. We will relay our message to Amazon headquarters and “request their opinions about potential solutions,” according to the briefing.

IMDb.com’s U.S. site still lists the film. Some negative reviews vanished shortly after IMDb.com was requested. Archived screenshots from IMDb.com are available at archive.org. Some remain. “Amazing China” has a current overall rating of only 2.3, out of a maximum score of 10. It has been called “pathetic”, “garbage” and “government propaganda” in some reviews.

Amazon informed Reuters that “some reviews submitted under the title Amazing China’ were retracted because they did not comply with our content guidelines for user review,” Amazon said. IMDb has not received any requests from outside parties, including the Chinese government to address reviews about this title.

CAC has not responded to my request for comment.

“WINK AND a NOD”

In 2004, Amazon made a deal worth $75 million to buy Joyo.com (an online seller of books and media). Amazon was eventually able to offer e-books as well as its popular Kindle reader devices to the Chinese market.

It worked closely with GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publication), a regulatory body that engages state censorship as its overseer of Chinese publications. GAPP is now largely under the control of NPPA. The Communist Party’s Publicity Department oversees NPPA. This was previously called the Propaganda Department.

A former Amazon executive said that Amazon obtained some approvals from the Chinese government, but not all. The former executive stated that this gave the government power over Amazon. The China Books project was conceived by Amazon’s public policy team as a unique way to “get what we want on Kindle” and other products, the source said. It was both a wink, and a nod.

According to the briefing, Amazon began to work with GAPP soon to establish China Books. According to the briefing, Amazon intended to advertise the portal as the first Amazon-owned store named after an individual country to Chinese authorities. Amazon provided several workers to this effort. It involved CIBTC (the government-book-trading firm), which was described in the document as the “executing body of GAPP”.

A photo on the website of CIBTC shows Chinese officials celebrating the launch at a Beijing hotel in September 2011.

China Books received the title of “a key national cultural export project” in October 2012. This was given by GAPP and the entity that is now called the Publicity Department of China’s Communist Party of China. Amazon began selling Kindles in China two months after launching its electronic-books service.

According to the 2018 briefing, China was Kindle’s biggest global market by 2017. It “accounted for 40%+ our worldwide device sales volume” as of the year end. Amazon added an e-book shop in China to its American site by that time and had already translated 19 books.

Carney was the highest-ranking public-policy officer who reported to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He visited China in April 2018. According to a CIBTC press statement, he stated that he had told an alternative member of the Communist Party central Committee that Amazon would “everyeffort” to promote China Books. He also promised to make China stronger.

Carney received a briefing that said: “Both China Books, and Kindle Chinese eBook Store were Amazon China’s principal commitment to China in Going Abroad’, an umbrella program that promotes Chinese culture worldwide.”

Amazon’s China Books page prominently lists CIBTC, but does not disclose that it is a project Amazon has created with a Chinese government agency.

Amazon said that “details of the company can be found online” and that CIBTC placed its logo and name prominently on its web page. We are very pleased with our relationship with CIBTC.”

According to someone who was involved, China Books eventually failed financially. The portal has not sold many titles and Amazon shipped books back because it had no space in its warehouses.

China Books continues to be developed. The Chinese-language version of “Xi Jinping: The Governance of China Volume Three” – is listed first on China Books’ “BEST (NYSE:) SELLER” page. Recently, it was ranked 1,347 071. COVID-19 was another “best-seller” and was ranked 10,654,483. Reuters had previously ranked the Xinjiang title 13,441,455.

The person familiar with the project said that sales wasn’t their goal. It’s part of a soft-power campaign that basically puts the books out and makes them visible.

CIBTC, a government book-trading organization, stated in a statement to Reuters that it didn’t rank books purchased through Amazon. The company didn’t provide any further details.

A THREAT TO “RETALIATE”

Amazon announced the launch in Beijing, China of Amazon Web Services in 2013. This was to continue its Chinese expansion. The 2018 briefing noted that cloud services were not regulated by Chinese laws at the time.

China took steps in 2016 to make it harder for cloud computing firms from abroad, like AWS, that operate within the country.

According to the briefing, government started requiring that cloud providers have a new license. Only Chinese-owned companies were allowed to obtain it. According to the 2018 briefing document, “Regulators are now very hostile” towards AWS.

Amazon made an unorthodox move. It gave its cloud technology over to Chinese companies in order to continue operating in China. The Chinese companies – not Amazon – were responsible for “monitoring and taking down illegal content, collecting and reporting basic information of customers … and working with PRC (the People’s Republic of China) authorities on all compliance-related inquiries that may arise,” the 2018 document stated.

Amazon informed Reuters that AWS as a foreign cloud provider must sell or license technology to China partners for the purpose of having a Chinese presence.

However, this structure was not able to protect AWS from Chinese pressure.

The briefing stated that AWS called China’s Ministry of Public Security in February 2018 to arrange a meeting. MPS threatened to “retaliate against Amazon” if Amazon did not remove the content from a US-based website that Guo Wengui was hosting. Guo Wengui is a Chinese dissident. According to the document, AWS rejected this request. Guo was asked by the company to expose the IP address of the dissident. AWS agreed and “provided to MS” the data. An IP address refers to a unique number that is used to identify a computer connected to the internet.

According to the document, “recognized our efforts to find a solution” was made by ministry. However, it wasn’t at their satisfactory level.

According to the 2018 briefing document, Carney was advised by Guo to bring up Guo’s request when he meets with a high ranking official from China’s Ministry of Commerce. China should not make any requests for data that is stored overseas.

Amazon denied that the Guo incident was a matter for which it could confirm it had been requested by the Chinese government, however it stated it did not “provide any customer or non-public information.”

Guo was not mentioned at Carney’s meeting by the commerce ministry. Amazon did not say whether Guo was brought up.

A MPS employee stated that the ministry does not respond to comments requests. Guo’s attorney said that Guo has no comments.

AWS continues to expand its China business. People familiar with the matter say that AWS is now able to sell cloud services to China’s government, as well as some state-owned companies.

Two Chinese firms, Tiktok creator ByteDance, and Hikvision video-surveillance company, are among them. Nike (NYSE:), Samsung KS:, and Philips according to AWS’s 2019 briefing document. Philips did not comment. Four other companies also declined comment.

AWS had announced in June that it would expand in China “to meet the growing needs of our customer base”