Yahoo Inc. has become the latest technology firm to retreat from China in response to Beijing’s increasingly tightening control over the industry.
On November 2, Yahoo Inc. said it is pulling out of China citing “challenging” business and legal environment in the country.
“In recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China, Yahoo’s suite of services will no longer be accessible from mainland China as of November 1,” the company said on Tuesday.
The pullout was overwhelmingly symbolic given that many of the company’s services were already blocked by China’s digital censorship. However, the latest measures taken by the CCP to expand its control over technology firms may have compelled Yahoo to bite the bullet.
The timing of departure coincided with the enforcement of a new data protection law by China. The legislation, dubbed as Personal Information Protection Law, took years in the making and is touted to be the Chinese equivalent of Europe’s stringent GDPR regulations. It lays down stipulations under which authorities can collect personal information and sets rules for how it is used.
Chinese laws also make it mandatory for organisations operating within their geographical jurisdiction to hand over data of users if requested by authorities, making it incredibly difficult for technology companies to maintain their promise of ensuring user privacy.
Back in 2007, Yahoo was hauled over the coals by US lawmakers for handing over data on two Chinese dissidents to the CCP, which eventually led to their imprisonment.
The move also comes in the midst of a deteriorating relationship between the United States and China as the two superpowers feud over an array of issues, including Hong Kong, human rights violations, detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Beijing’s non-committal attitude towards fulfilling its climate change commitments.
Earlier yesterday, US President Joe Biden pulled up China and Russia for not showing up at the crucial climate summit that secured new agreements on Tuesday to end deforestation and reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane. Biden reproached Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian ruler, along with Vladimir Putin of Russia, for not attending the meeting.
Tech firms exiting China
Yahoo is the biggest technology company to exit China. The products affected included Aol.com and news outlets such as TechCrunch. Users of apps such as Yahoo Weather were told in October that it would be discontinued this month. Yahoo had to previously cut back on its operations in China, stopping a music and email service in the early 2010s and then shutting down its Beijing office in 2015.
Technology firms have had a troubled relationship with the CCP, which had aimed to consolidate power by keeping a tighter rein on the companies that operate in China. Social media behemoth Google had given up years ago on its efforts to warm up to the Chinese leadership in exchange for concessions to penetrate one of the world’s largest markets. China did not budge and continued to impose stifling restrictions, making it impossible for Google to operate.
Earlier last month, Microsoft’s professional networking platform LinkedIn said it would cease to operate its Chinese site, replacing it with a jobs board instead. In public, the company cited a “significantly more challenging operating environment” as well as “greater compliance requirements in China” for its decision to relinquish its operations in the country.
