Amazon stopped offering customer ratings and reviews of books sold in China at the request of the Chinese Communist Party, according to a Reuters investigation. The Chinese government ordered Amazon to stop allowing customers to review books following less-than-perfect ratings of a collection of President Xi Jinping’s writings, Reuters
reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. Amazon partnered with a state-owned firm called China International Book Trading Corp (CIBTC) and created a portal, which it called China Books, that promotes Chinese Communist Party material and forbids negative reviews.
According to internal documents and interviews conducted by Reuters, the decision to create the portal was part of a campaign to penetrate the Chinese e-commerce
market and grow demand for its Kindle e-readers and cloud-computing business in the region.
“The key element to safeguard,” one internal document spelling out the company’s strategy for the region read, “is the Chinabooks project.”
