[AzzieElbab]

It is not just about data. It is also about asymmetry of control. China bans all of western social media and gets to censor tiktok with it is rising share of users and a bunch of others. Go write something about Tibet Taiwan or Tiananmen Square

[dkjaudyeqooe]

Yes of course, we have to lower ourselves down to China's level otherwise we're weak.

I guess also ignore China then pointing to the US and saying "our behaviour is fine, even the US does it."

[CobsterLock]

It is not about appearing weak, it is about a trade deficit . TikTok can make money off Americans with little effort but Facebook and Google have to make entirely new apps to get entry to the Chinese market (I can't remember if they still have live apps or if they are banned right now)

[dirtyid]

TikTok is literally a new global app for Douyin. It's not about trade deficits, it is about waning exceptionalism of silicon valley. They finally learned to debundle US culture with US tech. Something TikTok has been very agile on, making regional adaptations and complying to regional laws. Hubris is what kep facebook and google from returning to Chinese market 10 years ago.

[AzzieElbab]

Pretty easy to “debundle” when you just block access. If I lived in China I would take tiktok over any Silicon Valley app, and if I was looking for maximum network effects I would also use tiktok because potential market is 1.4 billion people larger

[trasz]

Which is probably the main reason China banned Facebook and Google in the first place (apart from security concerns).

[akhilcacharya]

Sounds like a defense of protectionism to me.

[gruez]

Are you suggesting that if one of our trading partners engages in protectionist measures (tariffs, dumping, subsidies, etc.) that we shouldn't retaliate?

[akhilcacharya]

For commodities like steel, yes. For TikTok? Seriously?

[gruez]

care to explain why?

[Dirlewanger]

Seriously. I'm baffled at the number of people that don't give a crap and that we should just do nothing. I hate to pick sides and perpetuate the "us vs. them" mentality, but the geopolitics of today are increasingly pushing toward it. We're on the verge of a new Cold War with China whether we like it or not. But instead of hoarding ICBMs, it's tech companies and the technologies surrounding them.

[akhilcacharya]

TikTok is not an ICBM.

[AzzieElbab]

It is not about morality or who says what. Can’t have billions of international users accepting Chinas censorship

[gizmo385]

So the alternative is to instead impose US censorship? How is that any better?

[13415]

It's not a bad idea to principally ban social networks that exercise government censorship on their users. I don't know if TikTok does that. Do they? The problem is also that what one country regards as political censorship another country just considers the application of reasonable laws. However, in the case of China that's such an obvious lame excuse - I mean, they literally interrupt phone calls in which people use certain terms.

[vlovich123]

I don’t to now why free speech is the issue OP chose to highlight. The bigger problem is access to the Chinese market. The West allows basically unfettered access to their markets with rules that generally are applied equally (obviously an ideal if not always the case). China is explicitly against that. To operate in the Chinese market you have to partner with a Chinese company and divulge a lot of IP to them.

I disagree with the way Trump targeted a single company but I think instituting a similar policy across the West to deal with China in similar terms wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to get them to negotiate a better status quo.

[FooBarWidget]

> China is explicitly against [unfettered access].

They are not "explicitly against that". They don't allow full access at the get-go, true, but it's a big overstatement to say that they are against the concept. If you look at what they've done in the past 20 years, you'll see that they're opening up to foreign business more and more.

For example, joint ventures used to be required. A couple of years ago, that requirement has been dropped. And now with RCEP, they're reducing tariffs for many Asian countries.

Walk down the street in China for 10 minutes and you'll see tons of western companies.

Western countries also don't fully adhere to the free trade principle. There are countries that blocked investment from China for political reasons, way before the "but China is unfair for not allowing access into their markets" started.

[vlovich123]

Proof? They still require joint partnerships [1] and IP transfer in high tech industries. Sure they don’t require it in others where they’ve already built up domestic competitors and obtained all the IP they need (ie manufacturing).

Granted maybe you have updated information here so open to reading about it. Claiming that “but western countries do it too” is unhelpful whataboutism. I didn’t claim Western countries don’t do crappy shit. In terms of market access and competition, that shiftiness is more about established players and regulatory capture rather than outright pseudo-fascism whereas China seems to have adopted fascism quite aggressively (ironic considering they call themselves a socialist party but I guess all authoritarian regimes end up looking very similar).

Saying “I see western logos when I walk around in China” is missing the mark when I talk about what is required of companies when they enter China (and as I said not all industries, but the ones strategically important to China somehow, especially high tech)

[1] http://voxchina.org/show-3-115.html

[FooBarWidget]

I've heard of Tesla owning 100% shares in China. Does that count as high tech?

>×Claiming that “but western countries do it too” is unhelpful whataboutism.

Wait a minute... Many people are saying that the west should ban China for not allowing full access. The whole premise was literally about whataboutism. Saying that we shouldn't engage in whataboutism when the whole thing was based on whataboutism in the first place, is a bit odd.

[vlovich123]

> I've heard of Tesla owning 100% shares in China. Does that count as high tech?

Yes and it was a news story when it happened 2 years ago [1]. It could be that Trump’s tariffs were sufficient. Or there could be other agreements not wifey disseminated that allowed for that. Or China made this allowance strategically because electric car manufacturing in-country is easier to infiltrate with spies to exfil the technology you need (whereas non-electric car manufacturers don’t get this because China knows how to make those and getting a cut and building up the knowledge and expertise how to run those businesses is more important than the manufacturing itself).

Re whataboutism, I should have been clearer. Saying that we should meet China’s strategic and intentional aggressiveness in kind and why it’s a problem, to me, is 100% on topic and not “what about X” where X is unrelated to addressing the problem being discussed. An example of this would be like “sure China has concentration camps but what about Americ’s death penalty” - you have shifted the conversation away from the problem of China’s concentration camps to the problem of America’s death penalty. Both are problems but bringing up the latter in the context of a discussion about the former is generally unhelpful unless you’re making some kind of specific point/analogy.

What I was proposing is that a more effective way to go after China (rather than a trade war or targeting individual products of China) was “if these are the rules China wants Western companies to follow to have access to their domestic markets, then China gets the same rules just for them in foreign markets while competitors don’t get that restriction”. That’s literally how trading should be done. It’s the same reason I’m against allowing countries with poorer worker protection access to American markets without accounting for the costs that American workers create due to the enhanced protections.

What I was suggesting was whataboutism was the parent’s reply that “well sure China does unfair things in their market but the West does other unfair things too”. That’s totally unrelated and unhelpful. A fairer analysis would realize that most things in Western markets happen organically and aren’t unique to the West as regulatory capture and crony capitalism happen in China too and appear to be (at least to me) endemic to most economic activity humans are involved in. There are exceptions but to me China is following America’s playbook in large part for how they beat Great Britain at the technology game (the parallels are just uncanny). What’s intolerable is that the US government isn’t addressing this in any way.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/10/news/companies/tesla-china-...

[FooBarWidget]

> China bans all of western social media

Many western social apps work in China. Microsoft Teams, Skype, Facetime, to name a few.

Apps are banned in China for not complying to Internet laws, not for being western.

Whether we agree with those laws is a separate discussion. Bans from anyone should not be discriminatory and should not target the origin.

[thanksforthe42]

I decided not to source my suppliers in China.

Having a gigantic conglomerate in control of my supply chain is too risky.

I think that's how we need to look at Chinese companies. Are you willing to deal with the biggest company in the world?

Although most humans are not going to understand that the CCP owns 51% of every company. And if they do, even less are going to understand the implications.

As a result you can have networks formed out of ignorance.

[justicezyx]

> Although most humans are not going to understand that the CCP owns 51% of every company.

False

Only state-owned corps have the 51% rule.

Proof is Elon's plant in Shanghai.

[trasz]

I wonder how Chinese schools work then, given that Tienanmen is part of their curriculum. Also, how does the ban work given everyone and their dog use VPNs?

[FooBarWidget]

The ban only works for people not using VPNs. They don't tend to pursue things that people do with VPNs.

Using VPNs isn't even illegal. Providing VPN service without a license, is. A license can be given for e.g. business use.

[trasz]

My point is - the ban is trivially easy to work around by using VPN, which lot of people do. And this means the stories about Chinese being banned from accessing western media don't have much to do with reality.

What is happening is pretty much the opposite - the West doesn't have access to Chinese media (except those explicitly targeting the West), for language reasons.

[AzzieElbab]

I am curious of how exactly events of Tienanmen square are taught in Chinese schools. Stalin’s purges was also part of the soviets schools curriculum, they were taught as necessary toughness - mostly bad people died with some minor mistakes

[trasz]

I just got genuinely curious how it's being taught in Western schools. The image I remember (from Poland, but media, not schools back then) was entirely single-sided, "evil communists murdered hundreds of thousands of protesters". There was no mention whatsoever about the whole context, or _why_ people actually died. It was being portrayed almost as a kind of mass execution.