As brands such as Google, Amazon and the likes of Apple pull the plug on their Chinese operations Microsoft is cuddling up to the Communist led Country employing close to 100,000 people in Country.

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 during the next 12 months. This is news that the Company has kept out of Western media for fear of a backlash from consumers.

Neither has the Company said what risks their investment in China has for business and consumers investing in their products and services.

The leak on a Chinese chat service puts the tech giant in stark contrast to rivals Google and Meta, which have moved to pull out of China due to concerns over human abuse and the way that the Chinese Communist Party run the Country.

US lawmakers from both parties have become increasingly wary of Companies like Microsoft who are seen to be cuddling up to the Chinese Government.

“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 New York Post in response to Microsoft’s expansion.

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.

Now questions are being asked about Microsoft and their products and whether restrictions should be placed on Microsoft.

Recently lawmakers from both parties have railed against TikTok over its Chinese parent company ByteDance with engineers from Microsoft working with the company on an artificial intelligence project.

Microsoft President Brad Smith who has helped shield the company from US lawmakers’ anti-Big Tech campaigns is now trying to defend Microsoft’s role in China.

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.”

The New York Post has revealed that Microsoft, has run a version of its Bing search engine that censors Chinese information 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.

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