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by treis 2143 days ago
>. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing.

The problem isn't that their Chinese. It's that they have implicit and explicit support from the Chinese government that give them a leg up on non-Chinese companies.

2 comments

The statement "they have implicit and explicit support from the Chinese government" is really indistinguishable from "the problem is they are Chinese".
Only so long as that is their policy.

The problem isn't the ethnicity or country per se, it's the state-partnership and monopoly system (intertwining them with a totalitarian regime persecuting a million Uighurs in realtime).

What does ByteDance has to do with the persecution of Uighurs more than what Amazon/Google/Microsoft has to do with the killing in Iraq/Iran/Middle East incurred by the US? I don't have evidence for the latter but it seems like neither do you for the former?

The founder of ByteDance has on multiple accounts critised the Chinese government: this is not an easy thing to do in China but blaming Chinese government's behaviors on a privately owned tech startup is a bit over the top.

One reports to the government censor, including the dates of children in other countries, in service of current human rights atrocities.

The other does not, and the atrocities (arguably incomparable) are in the past tense.

Iraq was terrible, but it is not the ongoing forced sterilisation and enslavement of Uighurs.

I think it's not very productive to discuss if one form of atrocity is worse than the other. It's terrible that we have to compare them at all.

Just like I wouldn't blame US's actions in the middle east on Amazon/Google; I don't see why it's fair to associate ByteDance with what's happening to Uighurs.

There are many things going wrong in the world, the question is if we are on the right path towards solving them. I would argue the current escalation is not helping but rather stir up tribalism which is not going to be our solution.

Isn't that exactly what USA are doing for USA companies, eg trying to force UK to buy USA comms equipment (giving USA backdoors too presumably).
They are doing similar things in specific cases on national security grounds but it's not the broad policy that China has.