However, it appears Musk’s principled stand against censorship has its limits.

As the Chinese government has sought to suppress protests against its “zero COVID” policies in recent weeks, Musk—who regularly uses his platform to engage with critics and offer commentary on issues of the day—has remained noticeably silent on the country’s practices of jailing protestors and limiting free speech even further than it has traditionally.

A Newsweek review of Musk’s tweets including the words “China,” “Chinese,” “Protests” or “Censorship” featured no tweets critical of the nation’s communist regime but, rather, praise for the employees of his business interests in the country. And numerous requests from reporters, including from Newsweek, have gone unanswered, even as Musk maintains a near-constant presence on the platform.

Newsweek has reached out to Musk on Twitter directly for comment, while media inquiries to his automotive company, Tesla, and Twitter—which laid off its public relations staff in November—have not yet been acknowledged.

However, his silence follows a curious trend of sympathies to oppressive regimes in countries like China as well as Russia, whose government he has largely sided with in proposed, unrealized negotiations to broker a ceasefire in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

In a tweet around the time Musk first floated the idea of purchasing Twitter, the multi-billionaire offered his own philosophy of the meaning of free speech, saying its definition was “that which matches the law.”

“I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law,” he wrote on April 24. “If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”

China’s policies appear blatantly antithetical to Musk’s philosophy.

While China’s constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, a 2017 white paper by the Council on Foreign Relations argued the opaque nature of Chinese media regulations allows authorities to crack down on news stories unfavorable to the regime by claiming they expose state secrets—which themselves, are ill-defined—and are, therefore, dangerous to the country.

The country’s leader, Xi Jinping, also has broad leeway over how the country’s regulations are enforced, leading to even stricter crackdowns in recent decades without input from the Chinese public, including the banning of some media outlets and websites and the imprisonment of dozens of journalists and activists. Twitter itself is blocked in the country, alongside other social media like Facebook and Instagram.

There’s no real evidence out there that Musk supports China’s policies. But there’s not a lot of evidence he doesn’t.

Over the summer, Musk wrote a column for the official magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China discussing how his company’s technology can benefit humanity. Notably, the CAC is the government agency responsible for censoring online content within China.

Several months later, Musk—who owns a large manufacturing facility in the Chinese city of Shanghai—suggested in an interview with the Financial Times that lingering tensions between Communist China and the nearby Democratic nation of Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of the country to Beijing: a clear non-starter for Taiwanese officials who fear impending conflict with the mainland.

On Musk’s own platform, prominent Jinping critics like conservative author Michael P. Senger—who has criticized China’s COVID policies as well as its political leadership—and pro-democracy activists Ai Men-Lau and Vickie Wang experienced temporary or permanent suspensions from Twitter, even as Musk reinstated the accounts of previously-banned figures like former President Donald Trump, rapper Kanye West, and white supremacist Andrew Anglin.

In an email to Newsweek, Senger, who has written a book critical of Jinping and China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic, noted what he called Twitter’s “bizarre delay” in restoring accounts banned for violating the website’s COVID misinformation policy, noting more than 11,000 accounts—including his own—were banned under the policy for what the San Francisco attorney called legal speech.

“Musk has said that all legal speech should be permitted,” Senger wrote. “Thus, restoring these accounts should take mere minutes, rather than the months he’s now said it will take. Given COVID is a topic near and dear to the CCP’s heart, as discussed in my book, no doubt CCP pressure accounts for at least some of this delay.”

Senger expressed “little doubt” there were Machiavellian politics contributing to the delays, accusing the Chinese Communist Party of “twisting Musk’s arm financially” through its liaisons in the west to “get him to renege on his free speech commitments as much as possible.”

Recent moves also suggest close ties to his holdings in China and, particularly, the financiers who live there.

His automotive company, Tesla, is highly dependent on the goodwill of the Chinese government, relying heavily on rare earth minerals mined within the country to manufacture its vehicles. And his U.S. operations remain closely intertwined with his business holdings in Asia: On Thursday, Bloomberg reported a longtime Tesla executive who oversaw construction of the company’s Shanghai gigafactory would be brought along to help run the electric carmaker’s newest plant in Austin, Texas.

Meanwhile, Musk’s October acquisition of Twitter was notably financed with the backing of interests with intimate ties to countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, raising questions about potential risks to national security.

Some, like the Brookings Institute, have asked President Joe Biden to enlist the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to investigate and potentially reverse the deal, citing the role of foreign investors in the deal.

“President Biden would be justified to use his authority under CFIUS to investigate the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, particularly as long as foreign investors from China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are part of the deal,” they wrote in a November white paper. “The risk to national security appears significant, with possible unchecked influence of adversarial governments in play as well as the possibility of providing access to the personal information of millions of Americans to these foreign entities.”

Musk himself has taken great pains to avoid questions about his ties to China. In a recent Twitter Spaces event, Musk declined to answer several questions about his feelings about Chinese censorship and protests, prompting speculation Musk’s belief in free speech is not borderless and can be bought.

“If there is a threat Twitter being free, it’s Musk himself,” Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek’s deputy opinion editor, wrote in an article for UnHerd earlier this week critical of Musk’s ties to China.

Senger concurs.

“A lot will ride on what Musk ultimately does with Twitter,” he wrote. “If he sticks to his commitments to free speech while clamping down on foreign bots, then that would prove his independence from the CCP. If, on the other hand, he’s just stringing everyone along to serve the interests of himself and China, that would prove his coziness with the CCP.”

“Failing to restore any accounts who were banned for ‘COVID misinformation’ would be conspicuous. Even more conspicuous, especially from a legal perspective, would be if he restored all those accounts who were banned for COVID misinformation except ones who discussed Chinese influence on the response to COVID.”

Update 12/08/22 2:58 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Michael P. Senger.