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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition? What are they afraid of? It’s a serious question. Are they that much afraid of their consumers switching to Western products? I frankly think it’s overblown. Chinese people will simply stick with homegrown products at this point. It’s way too entrenched for anyone to enter their market and succeed. I think they have made enough progress to open up their markets and they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf. Maybe 10 years ago it made sense but Chinese tech companies can compete on merits at this point. They have the ecosystem to compete without govt protection.

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> Why doesn’t China simply open up for domestic competition?

China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.

> they have so much to lose by growing anti-sino sentiments abroad all because they didn’t want US tech monopolies to compete in their home turf

Funny how microsoft, apple, tesla, etc are competing in china?

You are just parroting stale propaganda.

> China does allow competition. It's just that google, facebook, etc chose not to follow chinese laws.

HAHA, thanks for giving me a good laugh

Typical pathetic response from a silly political activist. There are tons of american companies operating in china. I listed few of the biggest. Google used to operate in china. But when china tighten their laws, google chose not to follow them and left. Probably because google, like facebook, are state sponsored propaganda outfits. Unlike tiktok...

Really skipped over expanding on the CCP laws that Google chose not follow, didn't ya?

What's the relevance? Would you have been more satisfied if Google were forced to sell to Jack Ma instead?

Would you have been more satisfied if the US government forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out of China.

The US is doing the opposite, it's removing TikTok because they probably spy / psyop for the CCP.

One country (China) was trying to force foreign companies to spy / psyop.

One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary doesn't use it to spy / psyop.

Yes, because it would at least show a modicum of honesty. Instead it's being done indirectly through putting a company in the hands of state-sanctioned owners. What difference does it make other than theater?

if they did that the US government would then be spying on US citizens by monitoring TikTok data.

how in the world would that show a modicum of honesty?

> Would you have been more satisfied if the US government forced a backdoor to TikTok? That's why Google pulled out of China.

What a dope. Imagine being dumb enough to believe google pulled out to protect chinese people's privacy.

Google pulled out because the chinese government wanted to monitor it to make sure google wasn't acting as a state actor pushing propaganda to destabilize nations. Turns out the chinese were right and google was indeed a state actor. Their dirty little fingers were all over the color revolutions.

> One country (China) was trying to force foreign companies to spy / psyop.

But that's google's business model. Do you have two brain cells to rub together? Why would the chinese force google to do what it already was doing in china and everywhere in the world? And still does today?

> One country (US) is making sure a foreign adversary doesn't use it to spy / psyop.

That's what china was doing. Dummy. Literally, china created laws to stop google/facebook/etc from running psyops in china and that's why they chose to leave china.

You must be one of the morons that actually swallowed google's motto "Don't be evil" hook line and sinker.

How stupid do you have to be to think google left china because the chinese government forced them to spy on the chinese. When spying is google's bread and butter.

You're assuming it's about economics, but it has almost nothing to do with that. Foreign companies like Ford and GM can and do sell in China.

The reason China restricts foreign internet companies specifically, is because the government lacks control over what information is shared on such apps. China is a dictatorship where free speech is considered dangerous.

And that’s my point really. US tech companies have all kowtowed to CCP for the past two decades trying to gain access to the second largest economy.

They did, largely what China did is make any companies that want to do business in China partner with a local company. From there what happened in many cases is the foreign company had their IP stolen and then shut out of the market.

China doesn't want western companies operating in China, they want western IP owned by Chinese companies operating there. That's why so many companies have pulled out of that market.

> What are they afraid of?

Definitely not the consumption of foreign products.

The PRC remains a totalitarian government which built itself on an environment where they exert total control over public communication. There are long lists of topics that you simply cannot cover, analyze, talk about or even discuss privately via internet media in China. There's no way to do that if those discussions happen on Snapchat via a data center in Oregon.

Does the CCP need to do that? It's a reasonable question with answers more complicated than I'll be able to offer. But for sure they want (desperately) to do it. Thus, no foreign media in China.

Pretty sure Google was allowed but decided to pull out (maybe due to censorship demands from China) not sure about facebook.

Facebook was allowed until 2009, it was blocked because it was allegedly used by ETIM to organise the 2009 Urumqi riots, and facebook refused to cooperate with the Chinese police.

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