A couple of months ago, Marriott fired Roy Jones, a 49-year-old social-media manager. His offense? He liked a tweet praising Marriott for listing Tibet as a country, rather than as a part of China. The Chinese government objected, and soon Jones was gone. (Marriott said its own listing of Tibet as a country was a mistake, but its mistake was not enough to save Jones’ job. Neither was the fact that Twitter is banned in China, so most citizens can’t access it.)
China’s government is notoriously touchy; it doesn’t like Winnie the Pooh, whom it thinks looks too much like Chinese President Xi Jinping. It also is hyper-vigilant about those things it finds offensive. In a column for The Washington Post, Josh Rogin quotes Katrina Lantos Swett, head of a human-rights group, who says “China is not content with censoring and controlling its own citizens. It is using the immense power of its financial resources in every country in the world.”
This is totalitarianism: not merely an effort to maintain authority over a populace, but to wield total control over everything even remotely related to China, and to stamp out anything that presents even a minor threat to official doctrine. There’s a lot of that going around these days. A. Barton Hinkle explains.
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