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Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Eh I don’t think the US is afraid of competition, but what competition exactly? Chinese companies can freely operate in the US, but American companies can’t freely operate in China? Obviously that isn’t going to go on forever. None of this would be happening if Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. we’re allowed to operate in China like TikTok is/was allowed to operate in the US.

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Chinese companies can operate in America as long as they follow American laws, likewise American companies can operate in China as long as they follow Chinese laws. Since America is a freer society that China, it follows that Chinese companies are more free to operate in America. The solution is obviously not to make America less free, but that's the path they've been going down for the past 20 years so no big surprise. If the American government were concerned about their citizens privacy they would have passed stricter privacy regulations and only then banned companies that didn't comply.

> Chinese companies can operate in America as long as they follow American laws, likewise American companies can operate in China as long as they follow Chinese laws.

Are you sure? What law does Youtube and Twitter need to follow to be allowed to operate in China?

> The solution is obviously not to make America less free

I don't view banning TikTok and WeChat as making America less free. We can just make our own. And we're only doing this to China and it's deserved.

> If the American government were concerned about their citizens privacy they would have passed stricter privacy regulations and only then banned companies that didn't comply.

Well, that's the wrong phrasing. If American citizens were concerned they would make their government pass stricter privacy regulations. But I don't believe that this is mutually exclusive to also banning Chinese companies due to other reasons as highlighted above.

> I don't view banning TikTok and WeChat as making America less free. We can just make our own. And we're only doing this to China and it's deserved.

If an American on US soil wants to watch videos on TikTok, and the American government says "sorry, we've decided you can't view that, contrary to your own wishes" then Americans are less free.

PS: "China" isn't a person and you shouldn't personify groups of millions of people.

They probably should have used CCP but it’s pretty clear they are talking about the Chinese government and not Chinese people. America isn’t a person but you had no problem with its use?

> Are you sure? What law does Youtube and Twitter need to follow to be allowed to operate in China?

They need to start censoring content based on the Chinese government direction. That's what Microsoft, Apple are doing.

> I don't view banning TikTok and WeChat as making America less free. We can just make our own. And we're only doing this to China and it's deserved.

The government arbitrarily deciding what you can and cannot run on your smartphone is a limitation of your freedom.

> But I don't believe that this is mutually exclusive to also banning Chinese companies due to other reasons as highlighted above.

The official reason is that these two apps are spying on US citizens, so stricter privacy laws would prevent them (and other popular apps like FB, Google, Twitter, etc. so it would be an even bigger win for the people) from doing so.

> The government arbitrarily deciding what you can and cannot run on your smartphone is a limitation of your freedom.

The government arbitrarily deciding I can't pour smoke into the air is a limitation of my freedom too.

I can't buy a grenade launcher? Limitation of my freedom.

It's more nuanced than that. The government decided that a population with access to grenade launchers is bad and so they banned all grenade launchers. The law to ban this type of weapons was also approved by the Congress and was not an executive order.

As I said, if Congress passed strict privacy laws that resulted in the ban of TikTok then there would be virtually no outcries.

I think the mistake you're making here is assuming that the United States can only apply blanket policies to all countries and can't treat individual countries differently.

Your aggregation view isn't correct in practical terms. The government (with the consent of the voters, I need to keep stressing that) decided that grenade launchers should be banned, but they didn't decide that all firearms or weapons should be banned. You can clearly see how you can pick and choose categories or different aggregation levels to take specific action on.

It's like, you ban grenade launchers because you don't like the potential harmful effects. You ban Chinese companies because you don't like how the Chinese government treats your country. I think it's pretty straightforward generally speaking. We wouldn't be here if China allowed free reign for US companies to operate in China as we have for a long time allowed Chinese companies to operate in the US. We even only ask that Chinese researchers disclose their military affiliation. In China do you think they'd let US military officers work at top research universities in China? Why wouldn't they? Why should the US?

> They need to start censoring content based on the Chinese government direction. That's what Microsoft, Apple are doing.

This is overly simplistic and there are a number of additional regulations in place. For example, Netflix (even if they censor) cannot enter China without partnering with a Chinese company because they cannot get a media license [1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/01/netflix-may-never-break-into-c...

> American companies can’t freely operate in China

McDonald's, Nike, Boeing, Microsoft, P&G, General Electric (to name just a few) all hold dominant market share in China. I have no idea why people constantly repeat this claim so easily debunked. US companies are everywhere in the country and making billions.

Because we're clearly talking about tech companies and social media companies.

The US trade relationship with China is much larger than social media companies (Apple, Micron, Qualcomm and plenty of other tech companies have no problem in China - what we're talking about here are media companiesm not tech companies in general). By focusing only on media companies, people in this conversation are getting a very narrow and distorted view of the US-China trade relationship. The US does very well, business-wise, in China, contrary to what most Americans seem to believe.

Sure, how do you define does very well in China?

Many US companies have made huge returns on investment in China, and China is a major market for many American companies.

This is a tech forum, so we can go down a list of US tech companies, giving their 2017 revenue from China:

* Apple: $45 billion (20% of Apple's total)

* Intel: $15 billion (its largest market, 24% of total)

* Qualcomm: $15 billion (>60% of Qualcomm's total)

* Micron: $10 billion (>50% of Micron's total)

* Broadcom: $9 billion (>50 of Broadcom's total)

* Cisco: $8 billion (15% of Cisco's total)

The list goes on and on, but you get the picture.

The numbers come from here: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trade-war-watch-these-are-...

That's "cleary" not what the grandparent comment was alluding to nor did they once mention tech.

Regardless of the ever shifting goalposts of those who constantly make this patently false statement about US companies inability to do business on the mainland, let's just restrict it to tech then:

I already mentioned Microsoft, how about Apple? Intel? IBM, Dell, HP? They all make huge dollars in China as well as benefit from their supply chains to sell elsewhere.

I really can't understand why people mentally cling so hard to this notion that US companies can't sell their wares to the Chinese.

Those are exceptions due to scale (and likely bribes to the CCP). If you go as a small/business business person to start a business in China, you absolutely will have to take on a Chinese partner with 51% controlling ownership in the company. They make only very very rare exceptions to that. Then they turn around and say the USA is "unfair".

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