After Twitter's sale made headlines on Monday, the Twitter channel The Relevant Organs, which bears the seal of China's State Council, hailed the new owner of the "world's leading propaganda platform" with "warm congratulations." welcome.

Now it would have to be discussed with "Comrade Musk" how a "random but disruptive inspection of Tesla's China business" could be avoided.

Henrik Ankenbrand

Economic correspondent for China based in Shanghai.

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The channel is satire.

But the fact that the new Twitter owner is also the boss of the automaker Tesla, which is highly successful in China, raises questions even for the second richest person in the world after Musk.

"Did the Chinese government just get a little leverage on the marketplace?" Asked Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Twitter above an article, bringing a fact that may not be known to everyone to the world public's attention: China is the second most important market for Musk's most important company and a major manufacturing site.

Musk's new acquisition, Twitter, on the other hand, is the most important platform for criticism of China's authoritarian government.

praise and contradiction

Nobody should be more aware of this contradiction than Musk himself. When the US state of California imposed a lockdown in March 2020, forcing a production stop at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Musk berated it as “fascist” that “forced people in their homes lock up".

Two years later, China's rulers have actually used force to lock the 26 million residents of Shanghai in their homes, in many cases for seven weeks now.

Tesla has already lost production of well over 40,000 vehicles in its huge "Gigafactory" in the east of the city.

But Musk now only tweeted that Tesla was doing "incredible work" in China.

Other Twitter users are not so coy in the brutal Shanghai lockdown.

There is a lot of content on the subject.

Videos of Chinese police officers beating people who have tested positive, their dogs being beaten to death, breathtaking reports from the filthy isolation camps, angry residents attacking local party leaders and the opinion expressed thousands of times by international experts that President Xi Jinping is going along out of sheer lust for power and against all reason the world's second-largest economy against the wall for sticking to its zero-Covid doctrine - all of this is replayed every minute on the platform now owned by Tesla boss Musk.

Sales without local partners

Tesla increased its sales in China by 53 percent in the first quarter of the current year, which now accounts for a quarter of international sales, the party newspaper Global Times wrote on Monday.

China's government has courted the electric car manufacturer.

She has allowed the company to conduct its business without a Chinese partner.

The pioneer from the United States is intended to use its technological advantage and its network of suppliers to pull the e-car industry of the People's Republic along and make it competitive.

But in the spring of last year, Tesla obviously felt state-orchestrated anger from Chinese customers after videos of the manufacturer's burning cars appeared.

Sales immediately collapsed.

Amazon founder Bezos has now concluded that Twitter has made Musk vulnerable in China.

He believes that this will increase the "complexity" in the market for Tesla rather than the platform being censored.

"But we will see."