Using your employer’s Email account for personal business can be/ought to be a hanging offense. We have had the Internet for a few decades; how can anybody who has a job which entails using the Internet be so ignorant!?! The ubiquity of Gmail makes such an offense doubly stupid.
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Who are “we”?
That’s OK; I won’t be staying at any Marriott properties in the future. They can support the authoritarian government of China, but I still support the right of people to self-determination.
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Those amongst us who think Taiwan or Tibet should be recognised as separate countries?
Ok (though Taiwanese themselves are kind-of split on the first question…)
But what is Marriott supposed to do? It provides lodging: It doesn’t dabble in global politics - and it probably shouldn’t. So it tries to formulate its pronouncements to be as neutral as possible. And employees liking tweets concerning touchy internal Chinese politics on official corporate accounts definitely falls outside of that.
So… I understand why you want to call out the situation - and you are right to do so. Because fighting for the principles of peaceful international coexistence is important and that means resisting the Chinese narrative in this case.
But Marriott’s actions are also rational and legitimate - so I can’t condemn them for doing as they did. Because you can’t run a business if you keep challenging the sovereignty of the government.
The only consistent rule I can see would be to effectively prohibit (perhaps by boycott) all western companies from doing any business with the Chinese until the issue of Tibet et al. is resolved - because virtually any trade activity requires some concessions to local political realities by the parties involved. And that seems wrong and excessive and nobody really wants it.
I would fire any of my employees who used my company resources to promote any agenda of a political or religious nature against my policy. If they did it with their own accoumts and time I could not care less if they even supported the vatican.
Yeah, but that’s not what I was saying. I was disputing the part where you said “Taiwan is a separate country – a separate China, even – to everyone except the PRC”
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Yup, the official policy on both sides is that there is one China. There’s just disagreement about who’s in charge. (These days, from what I hear, Taiwan is downplaying this, but I think it’s still the policy officially.)
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