There is a rising anti-China sentiment across the world as the world collectively battles a China-made pandemic. The sentiment is particularly palpable in India as an app named “Remove China Apps” has caught the attention of the Indian audience as it recorded a whopping 5 million downloads in a span of just two weeks with a rating of 4.9 on Google Play Store. However, after China’s rants, Google immediately removed the app from Play Store.
The popularity of the app has spooked China as it deployed its propaganda outlet to take potshots at India and warn Google over the existence of the application on its platform. Acting as an obedient lapdog, Google has removed the app from its Play Store after the Chinese Communist Party raised objections.
In a propaganda article, Global Times warned of an impending punishment over the rising popularity of Remove China Apps. The article claimed, “If the Indian government allows the irrational anti-China sentiment to continue ruining bilateral relations, it is likely to draw tit-for-tat punishment from Beijing.” The propaganda outlet wrote, “The software has drawn ridicule from Chinese netizens, who suggest Indians could “throw away” their Chinese-branded smartphones.”
#India's cashing in on anti-China sentiment using the app #RemoveChinaApps is likely to draw punishment from Beijing: industry source https://t.co/Tl406zKOFO pic.twitter.com/CniPhg7tpa
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) June 2, 2020
The article is filled with warnings and tall claims as it stated that the Made In India initiative cannot survive without the “power of Chinese manufacturing”. Global Times warned that, “The Google Play Store, which approved the anti-China app, is also accountable” as it seemingly reflects the firm’s “double standards”.
As soon as the article was published, Google removed the app from its platform which signifies how deep the influence of CCP is in the global tech giant. The app which is developed by OneTouchAppLabs and true to its name, the app does only one thing and that is, it identifies and deletes the Chinese apps on your phone. The app’s icon, a dragon and two brooms crossed behind it, points to the purpose of the application. It detects apps made in China on the users’ phones and provides a simple UI to remove them.
After 5 million+ downloads and breaking the charts the app has now been removdd by @GooglePlay. Unbelievable!! https://t.co/PVfEWlBvdQ pic.twitter.com/m4Rd7AHElK
— Vikas Pandey (Sankrityayan) Modi ji’s Family (@MODIfiedVikas) June 2, 2020
The past few months have exposed Google’s affinity for the Chinese Communist Party as it recently over 7 million negative reviews from its Play Store when TikTok’s rating had nosedived to 1.3 stars in India. So much is the CCP’s influence in the tech giant that Youtube has an AI which automatically deletes comments which are critical of Xi Jinping and his lackeys. When dastardly videos that promoted acid attacks, animal abuse, sexual abuse, rape, and jihad emanated from the TikTok world, people took to the play store to report the app and give it low ratings. Within a week TikTok’s ratings fell to lowly 1.3 stars and it was looking like a lost battle for the ByteDance owned app which rose back after Google’s timely intervention.
Palmer Luckey, founder of Facebook’s Oculus Virtual Reality (VR) in a tweet stated that Google-owned YouTube deleted his comments made about the internet propaganda division of the CCP. The comments were deleted within seconds hinting that it was not done by humans and that YouTube had programmed its AI moderation to pick certain Chinese words. Human rights activist Jennifer Zeng had also made similar discoveries in the middle of May that proved that YouTube was indeed hashing out anything anti-Chinese.
Google’s ties with the CCP have long been under suspicion. The search engine was banned from China in 2010 but it has found a workaround-model to generate huge revenues from the communist country. According to news reports, Google’s revenue in Greater China, which includes mainland China as well as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, grew by more than 60% to over $3 billion in 2018.
China is a country where right from Google to Facebook and Twitter, everything is banned. Most of the Chinese technology companies are copycats of their American counterparts and rely on the theft of American intellectual property. For example, China has the Baidu search engine modelled after Google, Alibaba modeled after Amazon, Tencent modelled after Facebook, Wechat modeled after WhatsApp and the list goes on.
Almost every American Internet giant including Google, Amazon, and Facebook made several attempts to penetrate the Chinese market but the Communist government made sure that they fail by putting discriminatory regulations and censorship.
While China keeps its market closed to apps from around the world, it has entered deeply into foreign markets which have unsuspectingly given it access despite the security concerns, and data extraction, which Chinese companies use to create more apps and to also push the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda in terms of PR and censorship — a concern which has also been raised by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The CCP through its lapdogs can try to curtail any attempts to punish China for its sins, but it can’t do anything about the rising anger amongst the people who are done with anything coming out of China.
