Amazon is concerning a group of authors and publishers highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The company, headquartered in Seattle and Arlington, does extensive business with China, from which it sells vast quantities of imported products in its core markets of the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Given its supply dependence on China, Amazon’s recent censorship of a book review critical of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the CCP raises questions about bias.
The reviewer resubmitted it without his name at the bottom—which he thought could have been the problem—and the review was again rejected, this time with a threat to remove his community privileges.
Neither communication to Kenchington, the second of which he thought was “rather rude,” specified what exactly Amazon considered inappropriate about the review.
Amazon did not respond to requests for additional information from either Kenchington or The Epoch Times.
The censored review stated, “Xi Jinping’s return towards Mao-type violent oppression and Stalinist authoritarian control is truly something that the world should sit up and take note of.”
Is the review rejection, therefore, a biased infringement of free speech, especially given the near monopoly power of Amazon over e-commerce in its core markets? Would it require Congress to haul Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, before a committee to get a decent answer to a simple question?
Kenchington wrote in the review, “The chapters on ‘Hong Kong’, ‘Christianity Under Fire’, ‘Tibet’, ‘Uyghur Genocide’ and Chinese involvement in mass-harvesting of body parts were for me a shocking revelation which made me so angry with Chinese policies and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) political system.”
Was the censorship because the author said genocide made him “angry”?
What is an appropriate emotion in response to genocide? Sadness? Fear? Neither alone would have helped Jewish people, for example, defend themselves from the Holocaust.
Britain’s prime minister during World War II, Winston Churchill, attempted to maintain an even temper and once noted that “a man is about as big as the things that make him angry.”
But anger arguably has a place in defense of one’s country and human rights more broadly. Churchill was angry at Adolf Hitler, for example, calling him “evil” and comparing him to the “devil.”
Apparently, Amazon’s community guidelines would have censored Churchill at the time.
Yet Churchill used his anger in that case to good effect, explaining that we must be “fierce” in opposing the Nazis. One shudders to imagine how history would have changed for the worse had Hitler not made Churchill sufficiently angry to respond with a fierce defense of not only Britain, but all of Europe.
Rogers framed Amazon’s censorship in the context of the CCP’s broad-ranging influence operations around the world.
“If Amazon’s decision to reject this endorsement of my book was no accident, it would illustrate that this is another arena where the CCP has instilled fear and gained influence,” he wrote.
“It is a sad day when censorship, for fear of upsetting Beijing, stretches as far as denying a person in Britain the right to post a review of a book about China.”
The Canadian publisher of the book, Dean Baxendale, noted that “this is not the first time book reviews and or descriptions for books have been censored by Amazon in order to not offend the sensibilities of those who run China.”
“At some point Bezos and Amazon will need to choose between [m]aking more profit through supporting slave labour in Xinjiang or finding the courage to stand up for freedom and democracy by realigning supply chains to companies and nations that stand by a solid ESG framework,” Baxendale continued.
“This book is not easy to read; indeed it is a tough task but a MUST for anyone who wants to understand the real threat that China poses.”
