In the US, public companies "have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable", and China is a gigantic market.

The rules that govern the economy aren't optimized to create equity or equality. They're optimized to push companies to maximize profit and minimize scarcity.

Without proper regulation, the companies that optimize for profit will scale much faster than the companies that optimize for ethics or equality. Consumer pressure is somewhat effective in the short term, but it never lasts.

>In the US, public companies "have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable", and China is a gigantic market.

This simply isn't true and I wish people would stop repeating it.

https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

> "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so."

I put quotes around the phrase ("have an obligation to their shareholders to be profitable") because even though it's not technically true, it has become a self-reinforcing platitude. Investors enforce that "rule", regardless of the actual law. If Blizzard-Activision said "we are willing to forgo the massive Chinese market and also we want Tencent to immediately divest from their 5% ownership stake", institutional investors would run, and the owners of capital would squeeze hard (as we have seen with Blizzard-Activision, which, to date, hasn't backed down).

That's the system we have.