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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

>this doesn't get enough attention. ByteDance could have easily partitioned off the US environment and made bank selling it. but the influence potential was too juicy for CCP to let ByteDance sell it.

I think that's kind of trivializing the position they were in. Would you take the same tone if it were an American startup that were forced to sell a big chunk of itself pre-IPO? Would you roll your eyes at them for "being greedy" at any indication of pushback against such a requirement?

I don't think the law is necessarily bad, considering the national security implications, but it's a cop-out to dismiss the burden of being forced to sell a major part of an enterprise as no big deal and the owner as just stubborn.

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> Would you take the same tone if it were an American startup that were forced to sell a big chunk of itself pre-IPO? Would you roll your eyes at them for "being greedy" at any indication of pushback against such a requirement?

to be clear, I don't think ByteDance was greedy. I suspect ByteDance would have been happy to cash out. but it wasn't up to them, they needed approval from the CCP.

if a US social media startup somehow got extremely popular in China, I'd understand and even empathize with China requiring it be sold. they'd be right to mistrust us.

> if a US social media startup somehow got extremely popular in China

China avoided this problem by ensuring that never happened in the first place.

No, we've seen this happen before in China, where some US company becomes popular, e.g. millions of people in China have bought iPhones.

Then China requires the company's operations in China to be more than 50% owned by China. The TikTok thing is very much "what's good for the goose", but it's also the US acting more like China the authoritarian country.

Apple China (if such a thing exists?) is owned >50% by the Chinese state?

I couldn’t figure out if that is actually true

China had a longstanding requirement that companies operating there under certain conditions had to have majority domestic ownership. It appears they've relaxed it somewhat in recent years and now I'm not sure if it applied to Apple China or not.

But the distinction is somewhat redundant with their government structure anyway. If they want to force you to do something there, how much does it matter if they say "you have to because we have majority control of this company" or "you have to because we have a one-party system and control the law"?

If the US government e.g. orders a US company to censor criticism of the US, the company can sue them and plausibly win. If you can't do the same in China, you don't control that company, they do.

> US social media startup

That also happened, e.g. YouTube (Google) operated in China prior to 2009, but Google US didn't much like censoring things on behalf of China.

The question was whether you would roll your eyes at the startup and have no sympathy for that startup because of the "big chunk of change" they could have gotten selling it.

You can both believe that the requirement is justified and that it comes at a big cost for the org that would have to sell. They aren't mutually exclusive.

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