> And then there's places like China, where the effective fines are "you either comply to the letter or you won't get to operate in this country".

It's have friends in the party or just roll over and do as we say. The "letter" does not matter. Remember the letter literally says there's freedom of speech there. And why did Google leave? Haha.

Maintaining friends in the Party, often Party Members inside your HR department and inside the board of your Chinese corporate division, means rolling over on their priorities a carefully considered percentage of the time. What that percentage is depends on context, but the whole structure of corporate life allows the Party to lean on the scale of decisionmaking as necessary to pursue national priorities. In most issues, in most areas, they aren't going to try to intervene because it doesn't benefit the Party to micromanage.

This works for Chinese businesses pretty well.

The problem for Western businesses is that "Creating domestic competition to any Western business with a comparative advantage which becomes too important to China" is always, on some level, a national priority.

My favorite Party explainer - https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/primer-on-chinas-l...

Why did Google leave? Because they didn't want to follow the law. Maybe they thought China would fold but they miscalculated.

The incoherent views of the hn user: "We need to do something about the corporations" but also "China is evil for doing something about the corporations"

"letter" here wasn't intended to mean "letter of the law", rather "letter of whatever we tell you to do".