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Comment by danjoc | Hacker News Reader

>Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple - all need to be shut down in their present form.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but then Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, and Xiaomi win.

I dont really understand why Baidu, WeChat etc. are allowed to play in outside markets like US/India when China is closed off from outside markets. The Chinese case is special and might be better of with special treatment.

Good for them?

I don't really care what China does. If those companies have a better product, then it is awesome that they are able to compete in the US.

Why? Because it means better and cheaper products for us consumers.

None of those companies have demonstrated an ability to "win" in Western markets.

None of the western companies have demonstrated an ability to "win" in Eastern markets, especially China.

All the companies that crawled away tails between their legs having handed their IP or at least business model over to a local partner say otherwise.

Those companies are trending upwards in respectability, strength, and talent. I think Andrew Ng, sometimes described as one of the top minds in ML, is indication that China has a place for such top minds.

If the only hope you have is that China and its firms have been weak before, and therefore China will be weak in the future, then this smells like motivated reasoning.

Please don't mistake my comment to mean that Chinese companies are "lesser", by any means. But companies which succeed wildly with the popular there may not succeed with the population here. This is more of a social thing than anything due to superiority.

As governments start to realize how powerful these international corporations are, and start laying down more regulations, it will be less and less practical for a company to operate globally anyways.

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