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Comment by sieabahlpark | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, what a great way to inspire confidence Huawei isn't working with the Chinese government to add spyware to everything...

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"Use Huawei's products, which are not controlled by the Chinese government, or the Chinese government will sanction you".

The Chinese government is about as subtle as an atom bomb.

That's pretty much the policy for any country in the world that sees a domestic company being -in their view- unfairly blocked from doing business in another country. They tell them "if you discriminate against us, we will do the same to you".

Really? What retaliatory action did the US take on behalf of its tech companies following their blocking in China?

The US has started wars to protect foreign investment. The history of Latin America comes to mind. Some examples would be Allende, the bay of pigs invasion and Nicaraguan Contras.

The fact that the US hasn't retaliated much in the tech industry probably just demonstrates that the industry wasn't firmly enough in bed with the government when China began blocking access to google and facebook.

Referencing three American incidents from decades ago (which, although I consider Chile and Nicaragua to be among America's darkest FP moments, were all officially -- and mostly corroborated by the historical record -- undertook in the name of national security rather than commercial interests) hardly indicates this sort of tit-for-tat commercial relations between nations is the global norm.

The US's coup in Chile was done precisely to protect US business interests. That's why large companies like Anaconda were so heavily involved in the coup. The thing that all those incidents share in common is that they all started when the nations involved began nationalising or restricting US companies.

A more modern example of this sort of behavior might be the original US sanctions on Venezuela in the 2000s.

They haven't been blocked in China, they don't operate in China because they don't want to support China's censorship and authoritarian population control.

This is just false. Both Google and Facebook have been reported as seeking Chinese government authority to get re-enter the Chinese market this year, and neither Facebook, Google, or a large chunk of the rest of the Western internet is accessible in the mainland due to the Great Firewall.

As I said, the Chinese actively censor what they consider harmful content. I don't agree with them on that, but that's their position. If you abide by their laws (that is: censor what they want censored and give them access to user data, I guess), you can operate. The UK blocks The Pirate Bay and various other file sharing sites because they figure those sites don't comply with UK laws. As soon as TPB disables the sharing of copyrighted content and appeals, they'd be unblocked, because it's not a blanket ban.

The fact that Google has offices in China, offers services in China and runs conferences in China should show that they aren't blocked as a company. Dragonfly wasn't shut down by China, but by Google after they faced internal push back by employees against supporting Chinese censorship.

Not China but google Boeing, Canada and Bombardier.

Which companies were blocked by China from operating?

Google, Facebook, Twitter jump out as examples. These are completely banned from operating due to censorship. Baidu, WeChat, and Weibo are the domestic equivalents, arguably dominant only because of this protectionism. WeChat has outgrown facebook though I think and FB could not win in China now. Corps which sell products in China (as opposed to those who buy manufactured goods that are exported from China) operate only crippled subsidiaries with 51% Chinese ownership for Chinese domestic sales due to their laws.

That's not really correct, is it? Google decided not to comply with censorship laws (which I think is a good call), they weren't outright banned. There's a difference between "you must not operate in our country" and "you must not operate in our country without adhering to local laws".

Any foreign company that isn't willing to create a separate Chinese subsidiary with a Communist Party approved CEO at the helm, and who isn't willing to give up all their IP to said Communist Party.

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