America's technology giant, Microsoft, today declared it will pull out its professional social networking site, LinkedIn, from the Chinese market later this year.
The American tech giant purchased LinkedIn in 2016 for more than $26 billion.

This announcement is equally coming at a time of regulatory shifts in the Asian country and amid rising tensions between the company and the country. Two weeks ago, Microsoft faced heavy criticism for restricting access to the profiles of some U.S. journalists in China.

Indeed, the company is hardly an isolated American enterprise trying to reconcile the authoritarian demands of the Chinese government with its business goals. Here, Microsoft took a sharp approach to a problem that likely would have only become exacerbated over time; the software giant could either bow to the demands of the Chinese government to limit access of individual profiles it found unacceptable-that journalists were suffering from blocks is not surprising, given the media environment inside China—or walk.
 It chose the latter.

LinkedIn wrote in a blog discussing the news that the company described entering the Chinese market way back in 2014 as "adherence to requirements of the Chinese government on Internet platforms" despite its also "strongly support[ing] freedom of expression".
As China shakes up regulations, tech companies suffer

But LinkedIn reported that it is now "facing a much tougher operating environment and increased compliance obligations in China." That shifting market context prompted the company to make the "decision to retire the existing localized version of LinkedIn, how Chinese users currently connect to LinkedIn's worldwide social media service, later this year.".

As Bloomberg notes, shares of Microsoft are up about 1.6 percent in morning trading, rising roughly as much as the technology-focused Nasdaq Composite index. Investors are shrugging off the news, in other words.

Yet, what the decision will mean for Microsoft's relationship with the Chinese market and state is currently unknown. For example, the Chinese Communist Party has been shifting its domestic cloud market into one that may fatally cripple its future commercial prospects for foreign companies. Microsoft's Chinese LinkedIn decision might be placed in the context of a future longer-term decoupling between the tech shop and the nation.