Because these said people don't live in the fictional mental construct you've created where they're cowering in a corner, shivering in fear of saying the wrong thing and waiting for the white man to swoop in and defeat their oppressor.

They're just normal people living normal lives. They have 2 legs and 2 arms, eat ice cream, complain about traffic and politics in person and online the same you and I do. Google is a nice to have but at the end of the day, not that important.

True, I was more thinking about the bit I should have quoted instead, about how few Chinese named Google engineers signed. That's a much more public statement with negligible upside.

China suppresses free speech, yes. But it doesn’t go so far as citizens being terrified of being known as someone wanting Google to enter China. It’s not like 1984. The secret police isn’t going to come stick you and your family in an underground prison for wanting Google.

People are pretty open about what they want. Google is something many people (who know about it) want.

FWIW, yes, I could be propaganda. But if I were, I’d be doing something much more useful with my time than browsing hackernews and trying to argue against opinionated software engineers who don’t want to be convinced otherwise.

> The secret police isn’t going to come stick you and your family in an underground prison for wanting Google.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what happened recently to bookstore owners in Hong Kong. Or people who "stir up trouble" by criticizing the government on WeChat.

Funny that you mention underground prisons, because they are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_jails

Chinese people criticize the government/party all the time when talking to each other. What even was your perception of the situation that would lead you to talk about "outing" lmao