Reuters: Amazon worked with CCP propaganda arm to promote books

Amazon.com Inc has been working with the propaganda arm of the Chinese government, offering compliance to strict regulations and access to foreign markets in exchange for access to the second largest economy in the world.

According to an internal 2018 memo obtained by Reuters, Amazon’s China Books web portal was the linchpin to maintaining good relations with the Chinese Communist Party as it expanded its cloud-services firm Amazon Web Service (AWS).

Amazon entered the China market in 2004 by purchasing Joyo.com, an online book-and-media seller, for $75 million, with the intent of introducing Kindle e-books and reading devices to the country. After years of wrestling with state censor General Administration of Press and Publication, or GAPP, for proper approvals, Amazon’s lobbying team devised China Books as “a wink and a nod” that it was willing to cooperate with the government.

The webstore was launched in 2011 in close collaboration with China International Book Trading Corp, the state-owned government publisher the memo called “the executing body from GAPP.” Amazon launched its e-book business in China the following year.

China Books has been criticized for offering books that amplify the Communist Party’s official narratives. Among its Chinese cookbooks and language textbooks is a book about life in Xinjiang that says ethnicity is “not a problem there,” which directly contradicts reports that China has forced one million ethnic Uyghurs into concentration camps. Others, like a book titled “Stories of Courage and Determination: Wuhan in Coronavirus Lockdown,” reframe the battle against the virus that originated in the country in heroic, more positive terms.

The China Books project has failed financially, according to someone involved, who said it remains up because sales were never the goal. “It’s a high-level photo-op,” part of a “soft-power campaign to basically put the books out there and just have it be visible.”

When asked, Amazon maintained a stance of neutrality, saying that “as a bookseller, we believe in providing access to the written word and diverse perspectives is important. That includes books that some may find objectionable.” CIBTC told Reuters that China Books was a simple “commercial relationship,” while the National Press and Publication Administration, the state propaganda arm that now handles most of GAPP’s responsibilities, had no comment.

However, Amazon has pushed back on some government requests to intervene, especially in its growing AWS services. In 2018, it refused to take down a link to the poorly reviewed “Amazing China” on IMDb, an Amazon-owned movie review site. It also refused to take down the site of a Chinese dissident, but provided his IP address, a unique address identifying the computer, through a workaround.