’SOFT ON CHINA
Beijing-friendly tech giant eyes major expansion
Microsoft is quietly doubling down on its controversial presence in China as it hires staff for a major real-estate project that the company is advertising to locals as “revolutionary,” The Post has learned.
The tech giant cofounded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen is looking to hire staffers in Suzhou, China, to join a “big global team” that’s focused on helping people find their “dream house,” as outlined in little-noticed job postings spotted by The Post.
“We’re transforming the real-estate industry into a revolutionary state where all of the rental tasks are done entirely online,” read more than a dozen job listings from March.
Despite the ambitious promises to Chinese job seekers, Microsoft has not published any press releases about its new realestate ambitions and did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Post.
The listings, which are for software engineering and management roles, are listed as part of a team called “Bing Rentals.”
They appear to indicate the company could be building a rental-listings app to compete with the likes of Zillow and Realtor.com.
“Leveraging the great eco-system Microsoft has been building such as feeds, search engine, browser, and app, this investment has great growth opportunity and will empower people with rental needs to find their dream house efficiently,” the job postings read.
The current hiring push underscores that Microsoft already has a far larger presence in China than most other US tech firms — and has determined that cooperating with the Chinese government is a reasonable cost of doing business there.
Compliance key
While other Big Tech firms including Google and Meta are effectively barred from China, Microsoft, with a $2 trillion market capitalization, has built a large presence in the country since it entered the market in 1992.
For example, Microsoft has run a version of its Bing search engine in China since 2009 and frequently censors results at the government’s request, acknowledging it removed more than 1,100 pieces of online content from July through December 2021 .
Google, meanwhile, used to run a version of its search engine that withheld results in China, but pulled the product in 2010, writing that “we have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results.”
Google later considered relaunching a censored search engine in China, but abandoned those plans in 2018 after they were reported by The Intercept, sparking a political backlash in the US.
In another example of Microsoft’s compliance with Chinese censorship, the company’s careers site LinkedIn had repeatedly followed government orders to remove posts from academics, journalists and other users since Microsoft purchased the site in 2016, drawing scrutiny from activists.
Big ambitions
In October, Microsoft said it would shut down the Chinese version of LinkedIn, citing “greater compliance requirements in China.”
The company later launched a new job-seeking product in China called InJobs, which appears designed to minimize controversy because it does not include a social feed or the ability to share posts or articles.
Although Microsoft did not respond to repeated requests for comment, the company’s then-China chief, Alain Crozier, gave an exclusive interview to Chinese state propaganda outlet China Daily in December 2020 in which he outlined the company’s ambitions in the country.
At the time, Crozier said Microsoft employed 8,000 people in China and was looking to up its employee count in the country to 10,000 by June 2022.
“About 90% of the new positions will be engineers and research and development staff members,” said Crozier, who left his role in February 2021.
Microsoft’s Chinese expansion comes as the company maintains a relatively high standing on Capitol Hill. That may be because Microsoft President Brad Smith has positioned himself as an ally to lawmakers as they take on other Big Tech companies, arguing that tech firms should work with Congress to craft rules rather than fight tooth-andnail against all regulation.
“They’ve flown under the radar well,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a cybersecurity consultant and former Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary.