China is among the several countries in the world with the most strict regulations and censorship.
Many U.S. tech companies have difficult times in having their presence in the country. And this time, the popular social networking platform LinkedIn has announced its plans to cease its operations in China, due to what it says as a challenging operating environment amidst greater compliance requirements.
The Chinese government has said that the Microsoft-owned platform needs to obey its laws should it continues to operate in the country.
The laws include forcing LinkedIn to undertake a strong censorship process in compliance with current Chinese regulations.
The censorship is so huge that it is impacting LinkedIn's core mandate as a platform open to users of different political and religious leanings.
LinkedIn has long been the social media where freedom can be shared through posts and comments. The social media also encourages engagements and discussions, as well as professional job listings among others. These helped LinkedIn become popular in the U.S. and other jurisdictions.
But in China, LinkedIn is unable to comply to such extent of censorship, that it has no choice but to shut down its services in China by the end of 2021.
However, LinkedIn also stated its plans to offer a new service only for the Chinese market, that focuses only on job posting.
Unlike LinkedIn the social media network for professionals, the solution would be a tuned-down LinkedIn with no social networking functionalities, and with no sharing of posts and commenting.
LinkedIn's first arrival in China was in 2014.
At that time, Microsoft knew the extent of Chinese regulations, that the company began introducing the social media with a localized services that comply with government's regulations.
LinkedIn even agreed to censor some posts made by its Chinese users, for example.
But since then, LinkedIn struggled to stay relevant.
Due to China's many regulations and censorship, complying to everything would cripple LinkedIn's core features and functionalities for users in the country.
This is why Microsoft thinks that it would be wise if LinkedIn can leave China.
Tension that is imposed by the regulations would always exist for tech companies that promote free speech in a country where extreme censorship does not allow anything that opposes the Chinese Communist party.
While LinkedIn is shutting down its services in China, Microsoft the software giant is still having other businesses in the country.
For example, Microsoft's search engine Bing is still in China, and so does its cloud0-ased business software. In addition, Microsoft Windows operating system is still dominating in the country.
This is giving a lot of advantages to Microsoft, because China is considered among the largest and the most important markets.
In the time when other tech giants like Google and Microsoft have mostly stayed out of China, Microsoft is still having a strong presence in the country.
It's worth noting that LinkedIn has around 54 million users in China.
