BanBot's right that in an ideal world, when people complain about something someone said, an employer could only say, "And what do you want me to do about it?" Like now, if you tell a local grocery store, "That guy said something offensive a week ago!" the grocery store would be like, "Oh. Anyway, here's your change," because we as a society have not put the responsibility of social punishment on grocery stores, nor have we given them the power to do so.
But now, as people advocate more and more for workplaces being responsible for enforcing "good behavior" unrelated to work, large companies ill-equipped for such a role are expected to act as societal enforcers. They fear social backlash and yet also gain more power in the process, thus leading to absurd results like we're seeing now.
If the social enforcement expectation and power were removed, China could complain all it wants, and Blizzard would just be like, "Yeah but we can't do anything about it."
That's how they relate.
TL;DR: The very concept of companies as societal enforcers is absurd, in all its various manifestations.
