[getmeoutofhere]

China's actions are actually legal under 1. WTO rules which allow developing nations to have some sort of protectionism to foster their own industries, and 2. Their own laws, which companies can choose to abide by.

Google and Facebook were never wholesale banned by China. You can see this with the fact that Google tried to re-enter China with project Dragonfly (a China-law compliant search engine), until it internally became politically unfeasible. Note that Microsoft operates Bing in China, and Yahoo as well.

[seanmcdirmid]

Google trying to re enter China has no bearing on whether or not they were banned or are banned.

And actually, I was living in China when Facebook stopped working, and I was living in China when google.com stopped working, and when google.cn stopped working. And you are right, they were never officially banned, China would never admit to that, they just used the GFW to make them stop working and commenced a lot of work to make VPNs troublesome to use as well.

Yes, Microsoft operates Bing. But you can’t access gmail through it.

[getmeoutofhere]

You just ignored what I said and straw-manned the specific nature of being banned.

As I said in my previous post, both can operate in China if they choose to comply with Chinese laws. Hotmail and iCloud do, and both works fine in China.

Google and Facebook being banned is no different than if they'd been banned for not complying with GDPR in EU.

[seanmcdirmid]

Again, China doesn’t officially ban Facebook or google, they won’t tell them what laws they aren’t following and anyways, China doesn’t really do rule of law. Google can’t go to a judge and say, ”hey, I want to prove I’m doing things right, see this Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of speech!” Nope, China doesn’t work like that, officials make opaque arbitrary decisions on what to allow or not.

[getmeoutofhere]

Why are you purposely being unfaithful in your argument here? I can easily search up multiple cases where foreign companies have applied the rule of law and won in China. The rules are clear to Google and they simply chose not to follow it. They tried to follow to follow the rules with Project Dragonfly until their own employees scuttled the project, but that’s on Google.

The existence of Bing proves that it’s possible to operate a foreign search engine in China.

[oldmartin]

[flagged]

[oldmartin]

Hey wumao, weren't you going to show me some evidence of foreign companies winning legal cases in the CCP legal system? It would be really convincing if you found some evidence of foreign companies winning against chinese companies.

[DiogenesKynikos]

A bit like Trump banning TikTok and Huawei on a whim, without providing any evidence.

[nsporillo]

At what point is China no longer considered a developing country? I think the argument is since they're now at least the second largest economy in the world, they no longer deserve all the special protections.

[getmeoutofhere]

On a per capita basis, China is still very much a developing / middle income country. I agree that special amendments should be made because a country of 50,000 people with Chinas gdp per capita faces a very different economic situation than China, though.