In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Elon Musk said that he wants representatives of the Chinese government to directly limit access to Starlink in China.

Beijing has made it clear that it does not approve of Starlink’s deployment in Ukraine. China asked for assurance that I will not sell Starlink in the country,
Musk told the newspaper.

It’s unclear from the statement whether Musk has accepted Beijing’s request, but Starlink’s service map does not show a deployment plan in China. Neighboring countries such as Taiwan, Mongolia, and Vietnam are listed as “pending regulatory approval.”

Why is China really afraid of Starlink?

Starlink has become a popular idea to circumvent worldwide network censorship by offering an Internet connection that bypasses traditional service providers. Recently, Starlink enabled Internet access in Iran in response to widespread protests and related censorship. However, internet censorship in China is much more organized and any attempt to circumvent it through Starlink is likely to face retaliation from the central government.

Where the wind goes, Musk goes

This shows how vulnerable Elon Musk is to international pressure, despite defending the principles of freedom of expression in his public statements. Tesla has a factory in Shanghai, and the company has sold more than 80,000 cars there. As a result, Musk remains closely linked to the Chinese government, even writing a column for a magazine run by China’s Internet censorship agency.

It’s also hard not to remember that Elon Musk has recently spread openly propagandist Russian narratives, in which he talks about “the Crimean Khrushchev’s fault” and the fact that “part of the Ukrainian population wants to join Russia”.

At the same time, Musk has a better chance of owning Twitter than ever before. After months of mixed drama, Musk confirmed in early October that he was willing to buy the social network at the originally agreed price, and told a judge in his civil lawsuit with the company that he believed the deal would close by October 28.