Would China ever agree to let Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Messenger etc. or any new startup operate freely and make money there? It should never have had this one-way economic benefit to begin with.
The priority of the Chinese government is the benefit of its citizens (leaving aside that the CCP doesn't consider ethnic minorities in China to be full citizens, as this is a separate issue) and its domestic economy, not the benefit of the American tech sector's senior executives and shareholders.
It's not reasonable to expect, much less demand, that the Chinese turn their tech economy over to silicon valley by allowing unrestricted US entry. It's not in their economic interests, nor is it in their security interests, and no amount of US bullying will change this.
China is not Europe; it's not going to hand over the keys to its economic future to the United States just because the US asks for them.
They have every reason to view the survival of their tech sector as a vital economic security interest. Confiscating the value of their foreign tech assets without cause, or legitimate due process, will not make the Chinese change their behavior. It will only harden their position and make future conflict more likely because the US has demonstrated that it is not willing to respect the rule of law or act in good faith towards Chinese businesses.
Slow-walking into another cold war isn't in anyone's interest and the deplorable behavior of the Chinese government does not change this.
The general position from the US national security elite is that China should not be permitted to become powerful enough to have a completely independent foreign policy. This goal is probably impossible to achieve even trough military force.
For China's part, the Chinese need to learn how to get along with the rest of the world, including their immediate neighbors, without threatening other countries on a regular basis. The kind of respect China wants on the world stage can only be created through non-coercive soft power, and that's a skill the Chinese do not have.
Ultimately, I think both the US and China need to temper their expectations and learn to live with each other. This may not be politically possible in the long term, and is not politically possible in the US under Republican administrations.
In the short term, US moves to destroy Chinese tech firms and effectively transfer their assets to US firms are not helpful for global stability.
Chinese tech has no business in government networks, but consumer use of TikTok, WeChat, and Huawei phones is not a security threat and the rule of law should be respected with regard to these brands. If the US doesn't want people to use these tools, then it can make better alternatives.
Pervasive privacy abuses by TikTok et el should be addressed through comprehensive privacy legislation that applies equally to US surveillance capitalism firms (e.g. Facebook) and not through bans that exist only to transfer Chinese market share to US firms.
However, I struggle with this part.
> In the short term, US moves to destroy Chinese tech firms and effectively transfer their assets to US firms are not helpful for global stability.
I can concede that this action by the US doesn't help move the US-China relationship into a more cooperative one. To your point, however, the US is not willing to move into such a position anyways.
So, given the US desire to effect change in their existing US-China relationship, why should the US let things like Huawei and TikTok proceed? It's pretty much par for the course as far as US foreign business relations and policy created by the executive branch.
In an ideal world, however, it's not in the US interest to escalate tensions with China unnecessarily because a new cold war is something that should be avoided. One way or the other, China and the US will need to live with each other and reaching some kind of mutual understanding on this point without walking too far down the path towards potentially violent brinksmanship would be the best outcome for everyone.
Is that actually true? China seems to be even using affirmative action to benefit its minorities:
It has some affirmative action laws on the books but they are 100% lip service and don’t result in anything meaningful.
Do you have first hand knowledge of this or are you just repeating what you think you know?
But you don't need firsthand experience to understand that significant discrimination exists. China is 92% Han Chinese, and official sources will tell you that the other 8% consists of 54 minority groups living in harmony. What degree of representation do those 8% have among business and government elite? Are there many Tibetan or Uighur CEO's in China? How about minority members of the CCP standing committee?
At a cultural level, widespread discrimination exists. People variously describe the minority groups as old-fashioned, dangerous, lazy, or as if they're attractions at a folk festival, with "great food," and "colorful clothes."
There are weakly designed and poorly enforced laws which are supposed to counteract that. For instance, people from minority regions get 10 extra points on their college entrance exam. But how much is that worth when no one will hire you because of your race? Unless that kind of affirmative action is followed up with something like enforceable laws around discriminatory hiring practices, or wrongful termination legislation, then its as ineffective as it is demeaning. Hence why I referred to it as "lip service." An insincere expression of a desire to solve a problem.
Isn’t that what Trump thinks he is doing?
I mean, there is plenty of countries around Europe that are sort of doing worse than China, but are still strongarmed by these Chinese.
Maybe the EU should also get in on this, not allowing any Chinese firms onside our borders. After all, our companies are even more fragile.
A call for global protectionism, in other words.
European data should be controlled in Europe, not on US or Chinese clouds and subject to the CLOUD Act and its Chinese equivalent. Lack of data sovereignty is a major threat to European sovereignty in general.
Confiscating the economic value of existing non-EU tech sector firms in Europe, as the US is doing with TikTok and WeChat, isn't the best way to make this happen, however. Buying existing assets at market value is a fairer approach.
Of course they aren't going to do that merely because we asked them nicely.
But, if we start forcing them to sell 100 billion dollar companies for 50% off, like what is happening with TikTok, well then they might start to listen.
Thats the whole point. I am completely unsurprised that China is acting this way. And, in response, America is going to retaliate and cause many billions and billions of dollars in damages to major China tech companies.
> It's not reasonable to expect, much less demand, that the Chinese turn their tech economy over to silicon valley by allowing unrestricted US entry. It's not in their economic interests, nor is it in their security interests, and no amount of US bullying will change this.
Well if what you are saying is true, then it sounds like we should try and get a consolation prize, of taking some of their companies.
Sure, they might not give in to our demands. I don't really expect them to. But if thats the case, well, at least the USA can still benefit by taking some of their valuable tech companies, right?
Alibaba wasn't protected by the government at all. Ebay's then CEO bought a local e-biz site eachnet and relocated to Shanghai but still failed at competing with Alibaba.
Amazon bought some local e-biz site too and failed at competing with Alibaba too.
MSN was a huge player in China with far more users than QQ when it was taking off. ICQ was in China too. At the time IM wans't a big deal for big players. Tencent went IPO as very small startup, far less than Sina, Sohu etc., China's portals.
Chinese internet giants could win because they adapted fast to local market.
Korea has KakaoTalk that's undefeated as the defacto chat app (and now search engine and payment provider). It's not doing well in every other place except Korea.
Japan has LINE as it's primary messenger, payment app, etc. It has some foot in other south-east asian countries but the strongpoint is still Japan.
And there were some debates about why China could produce some big internet players and eventually it was generally accepted that for one China has a big, or is THE biggest single language market and the other one was because in the early 90s or 200s China's authorities, who were mostly older guys in their 40s or 50s and didn't know anything of internet at the time so they didn't regulate it but let China's and overseas players compete. It was then so many talented people returned from silicon valley like Charles Zhang and Robin Zhang and also some local guys like Jack Ma and Pony Ma of Tencent kicked off their startups. And it was those local guys who grew really big because they knew China better.
The local start ups even couldn't list in China's stock exchanges but had to go list in Nasdaq, HKEx or NYSE.
It was only when China's younger regulators took power they started to setup the GFW and all other policies. Until then it was wild west.
But the US banning trade with China is nothing but an attack on Americans and my freedom to trade and communicate.
Leave me alone.
for instance you go to chinese restaurant - you can choose to pay legally with card or cash money they have to tax or undocumented untaxed income through wechat
This sounds like the exact opposite of the truth. Payment through wechat generates records. Payment in cash doesn't.
If they face strong local competition in any other country, they'd fail too
Google was about the only one I can think of that is not worse than their competitors, and their own product actually don't need much localization.
However, Google failed the growth part in China. Chinese users won't go ahead and set the default search engine to google.com on their own unless they already know about it, especially those don't know English. The homepage used by most Chinese are local websites like hao123 that would send traffic to Baidu
As others have mentioned, Alibaba, Taobao, Alipay grew the same time as mazon, Paypal and eBay was available in China. Also newegg had a much better headstart than jd.com but still failed.
At one time even Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger was a serious threat to Tencent QQ. Wordpress was much more popular than QZone.
The other theory is uncensored social media is perceived as a big threat to national security threat (I'm not saying CPP security threat). The ground situation in China is beyond the understanding of most population even a large portion of intellectuals inside China. That view was enhanced and many Chinese intellectuals changed their mind after color revolution in Ukraine, middle east chaos, etc.
Don't get me wrong, most educated people inside China are against censorship like westerners and the sentiment was very strong and still somehow strong today. "Animal Farm" and "1984"[1] are sold openly in China. But normal peaceful life without fear of danger and insecurity from conflicts is evaluated more important than economic development let alone freedom of speech inside China but it is not necessary applied to other part of the world especially liberal Western world. With polarization of recent events in US and consequential censorship on YouTube and Twitter that beyond topic of BLM/Identity politics/etc which result in many normal Chinese YouTube and twitter accounts mistakenly banned (This is not well-known in English audience), even more Chinese changed their view against Chinese government censorship.
The real reason is not economical but from a perception of national security. The perception is debatable but it should be at least included as an option of viewpoint as opposed to totally excluded.
Ah yes, I remember when the Chinese government killed off Vine to give TikTok a head start.
The US hasn’t issued any legal barriers for TikTok to jump over, they just straight out banned it.
Which will never happen. The Chinese know that Western companies would never want to comply with the Chinese law because the law was purposefully designed in such a way as to benefit the totalitarian regime. So they were forced to quit China. This is nothing but an indirect ban. This is very common actually.
For example: India imposed a 200% tariff on all Pakistani goods instead of banning them after the Pulwama Terror Attack [1]. Why not outright ban them? Because of global trade rules that prohibit taking such measures. So imposing a 200% tariff would effectively mean a ban only. No one in their right mind would import goods/services at 200% import duty. This is what Chinese were doing to US companies the past decade. Which is why US companies left China in the first place. Because staying around and doing business in China became untenable.
[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/policy/ind...
Windows has settings for timezone, language, currency, and more. Using the software sold in China, can you choose Taiwan or is it called Chinese Taipei? What do the maps show for the South China Sea, for the border with India, and for Tibet?
An article from December 2019. When the pandemic was in its initial stages and China was keeping it all under wraps. China had already decided to dump US companies way back then. US is more reactionary just like India. China fooled the World.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/09/china-reportedly-orders-stat...
Quoting directly from the article:
China’s Communist Party has ordered all state offices to remove foreign hardware and software within three years, the Financial Times reported, in a move which could hit major U.S. firms including Microsoft, Dell and HP.
The policy has been dubbed “3-5-2” because the replacement of the technology will happen at a pace of 30% in 2020, 50% in 2021, and 20% in 2022, the newspaper said, citing a note from brokerage firm China Securities. Analysts there estimate that 20 million to 30 million pieces of foreign equipment need to be replaced in China.
...
“Discrimination against foreign technology has been a part of the policy framework in China for years now, but it’s something that USTR (United States Trade Representative) is already familiar with,” Marro told CNBC.
“This might nevertheless complicate the discussions around Huawei, ZTE and other companies in terms of their access to the U.S. market. Much of the popular narrative has centered around the U.S. unfairly banning these Chinese companies from its market; at least with this story, the administration can publicly play the blame game of, ‘well, China’s doing it too, and they’ve been doing it for a long time.’”
U.S. companies like Google and Facebook have been blocked from operating in China for several years.