The US is hardly the aggressor on this one. They’ve simply been taking advantage of American greed for several decades and it’s finally catching up to them.
Your information is out of date. This has been progressively phased out over the last 30 years, and is no longer required in most industries. Just to give you an example, Tesla fully owns its operations in China.
And they see a locally-owned social network that can be repurposed for government surveillance/control as a strategic priority.
Facebook obeying the rules today is less important than Facebook being compliant with (and quiet about) whatever edict is handed down next year.
Zuckerberg himself said in his 2019 speech that they don't operate in China because "we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there." American tech companies absolutely can operate in China if they agree to abide by local censorship rules (like Bing is doing for China, like Google was going to do with Dragonfly, or like YouTube is doing for India). Facebook also has a substantial ad business in China [1]
> And insist that western companies give joint ownership of subsidiaries doing business in China to a Chinese company.
According to the Department of Commerce (https://www.export.gov/apex/article2?id=China-Establishing-a...),
> A large majority of new foreign investments in China are WFOEs [wholly foreign owned enterprises], rather than JVs. As Chinese legal entities, WFOEs experience greater independence than ROs, are allowed exclusive control over carrying out business activities while abiding by Chinese law and are granted intellectual and technological rights.
Also (https://arc-group.com/china-company-setup/):
> WFOE refers to a limited liability company that is 100% invested, owned by foreign investors, and independently operated. Almost 60% of foreign-owned companies are WFOEs, making it the most adopted business type. Famous multinational companies such as Apple, Amazon, Oracle, and General Electric are all examples of WFOEs.
[1] > Facebook sells more than $5 billion a year worth of ad space to Chinese businesses and government agencies looking to promote their messages abroad, analysts estimate. That makes China Facebook's biggest country for revenue after the United States, which delivered $24.1 billion in advertising sales in 2018 (https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/01/07/facebook-makes-a-new-ad-...)
This includes Chinese national security law which is far more invasive than the US law. The party can order a company to do anything they want, or make any physical places they want available to them, and everything is kept under permanent gag order.
> By using NSLs, the FBI can directly order companies to turn over information about their customers and then gag the companies from telling anyone that they did so. Because the process is secret, and because even the companies can’t tell if specific NSLs violate the law, the process is ripe for abuse.
> This includes Chinese national security law which is far more invasive than the US law
Does anyone have links and translations or shall we all just conjecture in a fact free way? All the above might be true or might not, but there isn’t a way to evaluate the claims.