[elSidCampeador]

> You can be tough on China without becoming China.

Sovereign nations have always reserved the right to decide what is allowed on their shores. That they disallow an entity from operating on their shores does not mean that they have "become China".

[ClumsyPilot]

You are conflating rule of law and sovereignty.

[benchen70]

China can do whatever it wants, US can do whatever it wants. Whatever a country wants to do has nothing to do with how it governed, law or not. Law is a set of communally mutually agreed upon rules, so a society can function. However, the key is the word "communal", as in - which community is agreeing upon this law. China can complain that the new laws in the US is illegitimate, but the laws are made by Americans for Americans. Of course the law is not going to extend outside US, for example, they do not dictate what some Canadian company operating in Canada can do. But, in the US, these laws are there for Americans, for American soil, under the territory that the US government formally rules over. Of course, the US makes these rules, because it is its sovereign right to do so. China has no authority over how or why this law is made. Just like the US has no authority to say how Chinese government creates laws.

But then again, China likes to say “Do not interfere in our internal matters”; the US can say the same thing.

[elSidCampeador]

The rule of law exists because of a country's sovereignty. Sometimes, the two must be conflated.