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> Well sure American and other companies have tried to gain market share in China, but China has effectively stifled a lot of foreign competitors from entering.

"National Interest" is the key phrase, and the US has similar protective barriers in key industries. Food security is one such area that the US protects, and to that end, it provides a lot of agricultural subsidies preventing a lot of foreign farmers from entering the American market. The pearl-clutching when China does the same in their national interest is lacking in self-awareness.

The US agricultural subsidies have interesting first- and second-order effects (cheap corn syrup, obesity and corporate farm consolidation) - but I digress.

As always, context matters. The shear scope and scale of China's protectionism, coupled with their flagrant disregard of international norms and aggressive, state sponsored campaign of industrial espionage is simply breathtaking. China has been waging a trade war for 20 years, it's time for everyone else to respond.

There are stacks of US companies that have made a significant entry into China:

  * Coke
  * Starbucks (the largest one in the world is currently in Shanghai)
  * KFC
  * McDonalds
  * Pizza Hut
  * Domino's Pizza
  * US movies regularly make as much money in China as they do in the US.
  * General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US.

Have they put in place limits that they are legally allowed to put in place based in WTO rules? Yes.

Part of the reason that AWS has two separate companies is because China, the US & the EU have laws like the CLOUD Act, GDPR and CDPR. It is easier to keep all companies seperate or at least siloed which is what most large companies do.

A wise man once said that all of the business contracts in the world don’t matter if the two sides don’t trust each other. So just claiming to stay within the rules & limits is not enough. Good faith goes a long way.

And the right way to out pressure on China would be to get a bunch of countries to update WTO and GATT to include these kinds of services. Instead Trump went it alone after alienating everyone else. How is that supposed to work?

The US would never allow Chinese companies to operate similar services in the US to any scale for national security reasons. So it is better to keep these issues as talking points than actually resolving them.

> To me it speaks volumes how restrictive and hostile the Chinese market is to foreign companies, can you imagine having to do the same for each country?

China is the most populated country on earth and an emerging superpower. They have every right to consider themselves exceptional, just the way the US considers itself exceptional.

To posit another angle: most international nations are smaller markets than the US (individually) so it doesn't make sense to customize things for every nation, which would be a goddamn nightmare. But this is a country of over 1.3 Billion people. China would need to be an exception anyway, and AWS having a subsidiary in China doesn't illustrate the unfairness of China's practices as much as the reality of how important that market really is.

> international nations

What's an international nation?

You are just rationalizing China’s purposeful one way trade barriers.

Explain to me how billions of dollars in subsidies for agriculture are not one way trade barriers.

If all China was doing was investing in it's own industries and sponsoring them, it would be very different from it's current policy of actually locking out competitors who dont have a local presence and such. There is a steep difference between positive economic assistance and negative legal barriers.

Without a local presence, how can the business be hold responsible if there's misdeed? US senators may even want to deny Huawei compensation for patent infringement in the US.

It definitely is. But the magnitude is much different. China makes it very hard to do business in a wide spectrum of industries. That's their right. But it's not free trade in any sense.

> China is the most populated country on earth and an emerging superpower. They have every right to consider themselves exceptional, just the way the US considers itself exceptional.

Being highly populated and powerful is not really an exception in history. The USA got (? gets) its sense of exceptionalism from their innovative form of government/constitution that provided more freedoms than any government in history. The roots are based in a sense morality.