‘Anti-American’: Microsoft faces US scrutiny as it nears 10,000 employees in China

Microsoft is nearing a target to employ more than 10,000 workers in China — doubling down on a massive investment in the country despite rising political tensions with the US.

In a little-noticed, Chinese-language WeChat post last week, Microsoft revealed that it has about 9,000 employees in China and expects that number to top 10,000 over the next year. Microsoft appears to not have made the announcement in any English-language media.

“Microsoft will continue to deepen the fertile ground for scientific research, solidly promote the development of computer science and technology applications locally and globally, help to cultivate digital talents and join hands with Chinese innovation to go global,” Microsoft senior vice president Wang Yongdong wrote, according to a translated version of the post.

Microsoft’s new hires — capping three decades of expansion in the Chinese market — put the tech giant in stark contrast to rivals Google and Meta, which appear to have largely abandoned the country in recent years as tensions have soared between Washington and Beijing. US lawmakers from both parties have become increasingly wary of American tech firms doing business in China.

“Any company that expands its business operations in China is either naïve to the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party or simply doesn’t care about working with a genocidal, anti-American regime,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told The Post in response to Microsoft’s expansion.

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) blasted Microsoft’s expansion in China in a statement to The Post.
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Senators including Rubio and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have called for the US to sanction a Chinese state-owned chipmaker that’s reportedly working with Apple. And lawmakers from both parties have railed against TikTok over its Chinese parent company ByteDance — even as CNBC reported in August that engineers from Microsoft were working with the company on an artificial intelligence project.

Both Meta and Google, meanwhile, have sought to kill federal Big Tech antitrust legislation partly by arguing that it would put American companies at a disadvantage against China.

Microsoft President Brad Smith, by contrast, has taken a more accommodating stance toward tech legislation, arguing that companies should work with Congress to craft rules rather than fighting tooth-and-nail against all regulation.

Smith’s tone appears to have helped Microsoft on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers often leave the company out of rants against Big Tech.

Microsoft President Brad Smith has helped shield the company from lawmakers’ anti-Big Tech rants.
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Paul Rosenzweig, a former Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary, speculated that Microsoft has faced less scrutiny from lawmakers due to its extensive contracts with the US government and military. He said the government’s “dependency” on Microsoft could make US regulators less likely to raise concerns about its China operation.

Nevertheless, Microsoft’s continued expansion in China poses risks, he added.

“The greater the investment that Microsoft or for that matter any other American company make in China, the more likely they are to become victims of any future economic conflict,” Rosenzweig said. “It cannot be a comfortable place for an American company to be held up as the pride of cooperation with the Chinese communist regime.”

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Microsoft will upgrade and expand its offices in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou.
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Microsoft said in its Chinese-language post it will upgrade and expand its campuses in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou over the next three to five years. Microsoft currently has offices in 13 Chinese cities.

“In celebration of Microsoft’s 30-year presence in China, the local team shared the company is on track to reach 10,000 employees in China,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Post, saying that the 10,000-employee goal had been set more than four years ago.

“We continue to grow our employee population in China, in line with our strategic goals,” the spokesperson added. While we do not share country specific employee figures as a standard practice… we can share we are already very close to achieving that 10,000 employee goal today.”

Microsoft’s expansion was welcomed by Chinese state media outlet the Global Times, which praised the company for “defying” American pressure to “decouple” from China.

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Microsoft runs a censored version of its Bing search engine in China.
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Google pulled its search product from China in 2010 due to government demands to censor results. Google later considered re-launching a censored search engine in China but abandoned those plans in 2018 after they were reported by the Intercept, sparking a political backlash in the US. 

Microsoft, meanwhile, has run a version of its Bing search engine that censors results at the government’s request since 2009. Microsoft also previously ran a censored version of LinkedIn that repeatedly caught flak for removing posts from academics and journalists who were critical of the Chinese government.

The company pulled the plug on LinkedIn China in October 2021, citing “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.” 

Microsoft later launched a new job-seeking product in China called InJobs, which does not include a social feed or the ability to share posts or articles. The move was seen by critics as an attempt to dodge negative headlines about censorship.

Across Bing, LinkedIn and other products, Microsoft complied with more than 1,100 Chinese government requests to remove content in July through December of 2021, according to the company’s most recent transparency report. 

Microsoft has also hired up in China for a secretive project intended to “revolutionize” the real estate market, The Post reported in May. Job postings seemed to indicate Microsoft may have been working on a rental listings app to compete with the likes of Zillow and Realtor.com, but the company did not respond to requests for comment on the listings.

Facebook and Instagram parent Meta, meanwhile, doesn’t operate in China — though not for a lack of groveling by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As part of an apparent attempt to break into the Chinese market in the 2010s, Zuckerberg went as far as to ask Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2015 to give his then-unborn child an honorary Chinese name, Page Six reported. Xi reportedly rebuffed his request, which appeared to be part of a charm offensive to secure permission for Facebook to operate in China.

China’s ban on Facebook and Instagram was never lifted — and Meta has turned in recent years to attacking rival TikTok over its Chinese ownership.

source: nypost.com