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Comment by cwhiz | Hacker News Reader

China doesn’t allow many western companies to operate in China. Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US??

This is an outrage that we should not allow. They steal our intellectual property, create state funded companies that are given monopoly access to their markets, and then unleash their stolen products on the world market. And if American or other western companies try to compete on the ground in China, they can’t.

Would WeChat or TikTok exist if western chat and social media apps were given total access to Chinese markets??? Extreme doubt.

The eventual end result of bending over to China is a world where all of the goods, services, and software are owned by China. This imbalance that China has created is unworkable and cannot be allowed to continue.

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>Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US?

The US gains very substantial economic benefits from being an attractive place for international companies to do business. Foreign investors know that when they invest in America, they're getting a stable regulatory environment and a reasonably trustworthy civil legal system. If America decides to undermine that trust for short-term gain, there will be a substantial long-term cost.

You might believe that hostile trade policies prevent American companies from competing in the Chinese market, but that's starkly contradicted by the number of American companies for whom China is a key market. Apple earn $11bn a year in China. Wal-Mart have thousands of stores there. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) have 40% of the Chinese fast food market and make more revenue there than anywhere else. Starbucks have 70% of the Chinese coffee market. The shelves of Chinese convenience stores are groaning with American-owned brands.

An all-out trade war with China might be appealing, but be under no illusions that it'll be all upside for America. If China want to put the hurt on America, they have more levers to pull and more staying power. It's definitely not a fight you want to lose, but it might not even be a fight worth winning.

China aren't thinking about next quarter or next year, they're thinking about the next generation. Where does the US see itself in 2050?

I highly doubt China has more levers then the US when it comes to a trade war.

China can't feed itself past subsistence level without imports. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/

China runs on oil just like every other modern economy, and they have pitiful amounts locally. They are the largest importer in the world and they absolutely need it to keep flowing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/10/17/china-i...

The US can feed itself domestically, and we can supply our own energy domestically. All we have to do is no longer put merchants heading toward China under the US navies protection and the CCP will be in serious trouble very quickly. Note - I'm not even saying we have to attack them, we just stop responding to any requests for help from them and let the world know.

China relies on the US enforced world order to survive in its current form. The US relies on China for convenience, not for survival.

Would it be wise to do what I just said? I don't know, and I'm not advocating for it, I just find it funny when people say China would so obviously win a trade war when they are definitely in the worse position at a fundamental level.

>China can't feed itself... China runs on oil

That's only a problem if the rest of the world sides with the US in a US-China trade dispute. There are plenty of net exporters of oil and food who would be very happy to sell to China and would be rather pleased to see the US get a bloody nose.

>All we have to do is no longer put merchants heading toward China under the US navies protection and the CCP will be in serious trouble very quickly.

China has a large, modern and highly capable navy. They are perfectly able to protect their own shipping against piracy or any state-level actor that would be insane enough to start a naval war. In the event of a direct conflict, the American navy is largely defenceless against the Chinese ASBM capability.

The US relies on China for convenience, not for survival.

US hospitals would rapidly degrade to third-world conditions without imports of Chinese-made supplies and materials. COVID-19 has revealed the fragility of global supply chains and the position of China as a manufacturing superpower. If you need a sufficiently large quantity of pretty much anything made, you don't have many options outside of China - doubly so if you need it in a hurry. If China decides to tighten the noose on American consumers, you're going to immediately see severe shortages of even the most basic goods.

A total trade war between China and the US would of course have a catastrophic impact on US export revenues because of American reliance on outsourcing - US sanctions on Huawei have had a significant but manageable impact on their smartphone business, but Chinese sanctions on Apple would be catastrophic.

> China has a large, modern and highly capable navy. They are perfectly able to protect their own shipping against piracy or any state-level actor that would be insane enough to start a naval war. In the event of a direct conflict, the American navy is largely defenceless against the Chinese ASBM capability.

Lmao. The US Navy has roughly 3x the strength of all the other navies in the world combined. If the US and China went to war, the US would control the seas in about a month.

America has a lot of very expensive but not necessarily useful ships (see the Zumwalt-class clusterfudge). China has an inexpensive anti-ship ballistic missile system that can sink anything in the Pacific. America's Aegis system might stop some ASBMs some of the time with a favourable wind.

The prediction that "of course America will win this war easily, look at all the kit we have" does not have a good track record.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/27/china-deplo...

There's a few things here.

First and foremost: Any argument we make is based on unclassified publicly known details related to the technological capabilities of both countries. This is an uninformed and untenable position to be making strong arguments from.

Two: There's not a lot of evidence the ASBMs can actually hit moving targets. There are a lot of impressive claims on the ASBM and ASCM front, but we have seen impressive claims from Russia and China on prior weapons that have not panned out in reality. Everyone postures about having a better hand than they actually do.

Tree: There's a lot of strategies we can employ besides Aegis. The US Navy has countered similar threats before, and can likely do so again.

This Congressional Research Service report on Chinese naval modernization is an interesting read in general, but has an appendix specifically discussing ASBMs: https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20191220_RL33153_d765d5...

I learned something recently about sea mines. and land based guided balistic missiles that render navy carriers and destroyers useless.

The us already controls the seas

>China has a large, modern and highly capable navy.

China's navy CANNOT project power into the strait of Hormuz to secure their oil supply. Any one of the regional middle eastern powers could cut off their supply if they wanted to. They can defend their own shores, that's about it.

>US hospitals would rapidly degrade to third-world conditions without imports of Chinese-made supplies and materials.

Yes, for a period of a year or two until manufacturing can be brought up elsewhere. In the meantime the CCP would likely have fallen while dealing with mass riots due to a cratered economy and forced relocation of hundreds of millions from the cities back to rural areas so they could feed themselves without mass imports.

Look, it would absolutely be a terrible time to live through in the US, and whatever party was in charge during this period of time would likely lose power in the next election. But for the CCP, it would be game over, and I think they know it.

>China's navy CANNOT project power into the strait of Hormuz to secure their oil supply. Any one of the regional middle eastern powers could cut off their supply if they wanted to.

A quarter of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Three quarters does not. Oil prices are at record lows and many oil-dependent economies are desperate to sell their production. China has made a lot of friends in parts of the world where America has made a lot of enemies.

China has oil pipelines supplying imports from Kazakhstan and Eastern Siberia, in addition to two natural gas import pipelines. China is the 4th largest oil producer and has an exceptionally large strategic reserve of around 400 million barrels.

China does not want a conflict with the US. Any conflict would be massively detrimental to both parties, but there are many reasons to believe that the US is socially and politically under-prepared for coordinated action in the national interest. Is this really a fight you want to pick? What does "winning" even look like?

> Is this really a fight you want to pick? What does "winning" even look like?

If this kind of analysis mattered to people, the US might be doing something differently in the Middle East.

I remember reading that the goal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was to make sure Southeast Asian countries continued to weight American desires more heavily than Chinese desires in their own policies. Apparently there's a substantial section of the US state that views it as a priority to make sure that e.g. Vietnam doesn't "flip" over to China.

But that's completely insane. Vietnam definitely will flip to China, no matter what. A Vietnam that looked more to the US than to China would make as much sense as a Canada that looked more to China than to the US.

or like Japan or Korea.

> China's navy CANNOT project power into the strait of Hormuz to secure their oil supply. Any one of the regional middle eastern powers could cut off their supply if they wanted to.

Iran would probably have a thing or two to say about that. And I don't think any of the Arab powers are internally stable or capable enough to take on Iran, yet alone China.

Iraq did.

Take on would most likely a persistent guerilla warfare. It is cheaper than diect confrontation, and possible denial of plausibility. Without a strong power projection, distant gueriella warfare with minimal combatants can wreck havoc as what USSR and USA found out many decades ago in Agfhan and Vietnam.

Don't forget coal [0]:

"Coal remains the foundation of the Chinese energy system, covering close to 70 percent of the country's primary energy needs and representing 80 percent of the fuel used in electricity generation"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_China

> The US can feed itself domestically

...for about 20 more years, if soil quality and climate predictions are accurate.

Out of curiosity, do you have links to more information about this?

China can feed itself. It doesn't have to be beyond subsistence level.

China runs like every other country on oil, but a large part of that demand for oil is to produce for the rest of the world. You need to calculate the actual domestic demand for oil and related products rather than total demand. The US can supply its energy domestically, but what if the US have to reopen the factories once closed to make other products? Will the oil be fluent? Oil isn't just the thing you put in your car. You'd be surprised how many of our modern products need oil (plastic, fabric etc).

Of course, those statements are made under the same assumption that there are only China and US in the world, or that the whole world go in to isolationist status. I'd rather not make any argument here, but to suggest somehow China's continued survival depended upon the global market while the US's doesn't is nothing more than an illusion.

This action is unfortunately part of the normal progression of disruptive innovation. Upstart China has adopted a disruptive strategy of engaging with world markets while using heavy-handed regulation to avoid being controlled by those markets. Incumbent USG is now copying China's strategy, claiming that doing so is necessary to keep the US competitive. However, the US is a world leader through free markets and open collaboration, deferring control to markets even to the detriment of our own citizens. What copying China's strategy will actually do is cannibalize the US's existing economic structure, causing extreme damage to the US.

Bang on the money, except for one thing - the USG is copying China's tactics, with no real understanding of the strategy.

I think too much brain-cells are devoted to debating this point based on non-factual premises. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tiktok-china-state-medi...

According to Lee Kai-Fu who launched Google in China: "Chinese laws are clear about what foreign companies can do to operate in China. In TikTok's case, though, the company was left no choice but to consider a forced sale."

China doesn't not allow western companies to operate. Google proactively made the choice to exit China. I'm not arguing that they should have elected to follow Chinese laws but the actions the Chinese government took with western companies was not to either tell them to stop existing in the Chinese market or abdicate their ownership to a domestic company.

Let's debate on non-imaginary premises.

The Chinese government forces foreign companies to do business with a domestic company, which they then use to raid the foreign company's intellectual property, develop a localized state-backed clone product, which they then allow to "compete" and inevitably crush the foreign company's product.

It's not as straightforward as outright "abdication of ownership to a domestic company," but the end-result is similar, and I'd argue it's more morally reprehensible.

At least TikTok is going to get a check.

Ya that's another very common frustration against an imaginary premise.

Western companies that enter joint ventures in China with IP transfers are proactively done with executives who explicitly weigh the cost benefit of gaining the Chinese market and choose to do so.

An equivalent here would be for ByteDance to choose to enter the US market knowing they need to oxymoronically abdicate ownership once they do.

You're referencing joint-venture requirements. They've been phased out in most industries over the past three decades, and they're not as onerous as you're depicting them.

Plenty of Western manufacturers did fine over decades with junior partners. VW never lost its technological edge to a Chinese competitor, despite being in a joint venture since 1984.

Em... how to force. punish you if you don't run a business?

> China doesn’t allow many western companies to operate in China.

This is simply false, yet it gets repeated on every discussion about China.

Western companies are everywhere in China, and they make massive revenues there. The presence of Chinese companies in the West is tiny by comparison (if you want proof, just look at FDI figures in each direction). Anyone who's spent time in both places can see this.

It's very difficult to discuss China-US trade issues when so many people begin from completely false assumptions about what the present situation is.

Two companies that are blocked in China, and are particularly relevant to this conversation, are Google and Facebook.

facebook and google are given conditions that, if satisfied, would allow them to operate in china. the same cannot be said about tik tok and the us market

That is why China Win-Win.

It has forced the conditions that is theirs as a totalitarian country. USA cannot enforce any condition because it is a free country. And they can come in with their values. But USA cannot go in with its value.

Continue it is the downfall of the USA and humanity. That is why China has to stop Win-then-Win again (yes Win-Win is China win two times).

Open market to assist China to limit their people freedom, that is a great move by Google if only money matter.

And as said, China is poor of everything except money. Want this bad money driven out good one.

Free country doesn't mean you can't set rules or conditions to do business here. We do that all the time. In fact, we don't even let some companies do business with certain countries. We can definitely give TikTok an ultimatum - we just don't want to.

I don’t follow the logic of “China does something that we think is bad, therefore we must do the same thing that we think is bad.”

So then how do you stop China from doing the bad thing?

Is that relevant? Do you think this will make any difference in China’s internal policies?

It make difference to your country's companies to make business there.

One assumption as to why "do the bad thing" is "because it will make China behave in the manner we want".

Tit-for-tat has been found to be the most effective strategy in prisoner dilemma type situations. If China lets us into their markets then we will let them into ours. This was the whole point of letting China join the WTO, but China has completely ignored any rulings against it by the WTO courts. It not playing fairly. These individual trade sanctions by the US are the only way to make China keep up its end of the deal.

Trade is basically the opposite of a prisoner's dilemma, though. Cooperation dominates defection.

I think the main idea in the prisoner's dilemma is that in the defect/no defect case the defector has great gains and the non-defector has great losses. Who gains and who loses is the key and that is what China has been doing to the West since entering the WTO in 2001. Tit-for-tat quickly eliminates the gains for the defector.

This doesn’t seem like a prisoner dilemma though, because I think there’s a good argument that the US is better off cooperating (allowing Tik Tok) than defecting regardless of China’s actions.

I think the principle of regulatory reciprocity is fairly standard. If country X has tarrifs on your goods, it's fairly standard to bring up the same tarrifs on their goods into your country. Same with visa laws. If country X defacto bans certain products and companies from operating/selling in their country on the basis of national origin and not product type, then I would assume eventually the same would happen on the other side.

Without reciprocity, the other country has little incentive to come to the negotiating table to reciporically remove those tarrifs, bans and visa restrictions.

I think it’s not obvious that you can directly apply the logic of tariffs to (largely free) internet services provided by companies in other countries. You could make the argument that they should be treated the same, but I think the argument needs to be explicit rather than assumed.

Also, this entire mode of argument doesn’t address the idea that this is a national security or privacy issue.

> I think the principle of regulatory reciprocity is fairly standard

In this case, since it's a communication tool, this is more freedom restriction reciprocity than regulatory reciprocity. Communication freedom is not the fire you want to fight fire with.

> I think the principle of regulatory reciprocity is fairly standard. If country X has tarrifs on your goods, it's fairly standard to bring up the same tarrifs on their goods into your country.

We agree that it’s standard. The interesting question is whether it’s sensible.

Personally, as citizen Denmark, if Italy puts a 50 tariff on Danish sausages, I would prefer that Denmark not put any tariff on Italian sausages.

The US is announcing aluminum tariffs against Canada. Canada's PM announces that aluminum tarrifs are a bad idea and hurt everybody, but until the US gets rid of them, Canada will match them dollar for dollar with its own aluminum tarrifs.

Do you follow the logic in this case?

Good example of how the US is hurting itself by picking petty fights with friends instead of unifying against China.

Clearly that doesn't make any sense as you stated it, however the premise that "we must do the same thing that we think is bad" is a false premise. All else equal, barring companies from operating is a bad thing, that makes all of us worse off. But when China is doing that to us, "all else" is not "equal". The same goes for when Chinese companies are effectively appendages of a genocidal Chinese state -- all else is most certainly not equal.

A very simple analogy is to that of interpersonal violence. All else equal, it's bad to point a gun at someone. But if they're threatening you with a gun first and unjustifiably, then it's no longer bad. In fact its bad not to fight back, since to not do so would allow wickedness to flourish. And any argument along the lines of "two wrongs don't make a right" is of course absurd.

I don’t follow the logic of “China does something that we think is bad, therefore we must just ignore it"

Ignoring it and doing the same bad thing are not the only two options.

When you say "steal" and "imbalance that China has created" - you expect to move almost all design, planning and manufacturing to China gradually over decades of time, give them all the technology because they are just "low-level workers", embrace what they build themselves because it's cheaper and good enough, and for them to be happy, in perpetuum, to receive a fraction of the profits? This situation was not created by China - it's just completely expected consequences of decades of un-strategical behavior which is now starting to bite back.

I find your comment to be in bad faith. You failed to address Chinese bans of American companies, which was the thrust of parent's comment, and which is obviously the unfair imbalance China created. Quoting imbalance but ignoring the example is bad faith.

Very few American companies are banned from China. The parent's comment is based on false premises about the economic relationship between the US and China.

Yes, China very selectively bans American companies, just as the US is now very selectively banning the same types of companies. It’s just Mercantilism: be open in all ways except the key industries you wish to develop domestically. I don’t think mercantilism is fundamentally evil (it’s how Japan and South Korea became wealthy first world nations at certain American industries expense) but don’t cry when your trade partners bite back.

It's quite amazing how many people believe that a poor country like the China of the 1990s and early 2000s could manage to hoodwink the Western world into accepting an imbalanced relationship favoring China.

The fact is that Western companies benefitted massively from China's opening-up, and that China was forced to undergo many painful reforms in order to join the WTO. An entire generation of Chinese workers lost their social safety network as a result of the breaking up of the state-run sector.

The joint venture and IP transfer requirements, which have been rolled back over time, were a small price to pay in exchange for accessing a massive pool of cheap labor and a rapidly growing consumer market.

Because allowing Chinese companies to operate in the US is good for American consumers. This isn’t a zero-sum game.

This short sighted policy is what has led to the slow decay of the American middle class.

No, the policy that lead to the decay of the American middle class is not China's rules on foreign investment.

The policy that lead to that is American companies embracing globalism, which is, by the way, an American neo-liberal ideology.

You can embrace globalism without damaging your economy. You just have to choose to only deal with countries that play fairly. China does not play fairly and, as such, we should not do business with them.

I'm not in agreement or disagreement but I'm genuinely curious how you can embrace globalism without damaging your economy? I have found myself leaning more towards neo-liberalism in some aspects but I don't know how this piece fits in.

USA has embraced globalism and benefitting from it.

American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders.

"The recent stability in the share of adults living in middle-income households marks a shift from a decades-long downward trend. From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points. But that shift was not all down the economic ladder. Indeed, the increase in the share of adults who are upper income was greater than the increase in the share who are lower income over that period, a sign of economic progress overall."

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...

"American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders."

As your quote says, it's not the wealth that has moved per say, but that people have moved upward out of the middle class and brought that wealth with them with more people moving up than moving down.

Right. I see how my wording can be wrong.

I saw some comments (in this thread and some others) that seems to be of the opinion that USA has not benefitted by embracing globalization. That opinion is in contrast to what I have seen in data analysis/reports.

So I wanted to say that maybe problem is not that USA hasn't benefitted from globalization but rather that benefit hasn't been distributed appropriately.

I'm not from USA and my knowledge comes by reading about news reports and expert data analysis so I might be missing something.

Why should the American middle class give two shits about American businesses having to jump through hoops to operate in China?

90% of their income comes from wages, not investments. The last thing they want is for American businesses to operate in China, period - because operating in China typically means that manufacturing capacity gets moved there. This unfairness is only unfair to the owner class - the middle class is actually a net beneficiary of policies that make offshoring harder.

China's policies that make foreign operation in it difficult are, in that sense, actually a gift to the American middle class.

Globalism is and always was inevitable and has in fact started already 200 years ago. It's also not a problem. A problem is how countries deal with the middle class and how they transform their society when there are shifts in production. For example, it's not China's fault that the average salary of a US CEO was 361 times higher than that of a factory worker in 2018, as opposed to only having been 20 times higher in the 1950s.

What we see right now is really just the emergence of China as an economic super-power, thanks to their gigantic internal market and their technological advances. This was predicted for the past 40 years or so and it nothing to do with the problems that the US is facing. These problems are mostly internal.

China is basically: low start + motivation + good education + low costs + state level protectionism + long term planning

Consider every concern about facebook having too much power on things like elections.

Now imagine if facebook were controlled by an adversarial authoritarian regime.

Or looking at the PRISM program it's better to ban Facebook and it's children companies rather than imagining .

It would not be at all unreasonable for other countries to ban US social media companies.

How is it good for American consumers? Their privacy is further eroded in service of a violently oppressive totalitarian state. Also, the companies these Chinese companies compete against do not have equal access to Chinese markets, providing a significant advantage to Chinese companies: the supposed benefit to the consumer (reduced prices due to competition) erodes quickly in such an environment.

> Also, the companies these Chinese companies compete against do not have equal access to Chinese markets

That's just not true. All American tech companies can operate in China if they follow local laws, that's why Skype and iMessage are popular in China. Chinese companies have to follow the same local laws as well. Google/Facebook, etc voluntarily pulled out of the Chinese market because they don't want to follow China's draconian tech laws.

Those laws require Chinese companies to have ownership stakes, sometimes majority ownership stakes, if not explicitly then effectively. That isn't "equal access".

Again, complete lies.

Ownership requirement is only for joint ventures. Both Apple and Microsoft operate in China in full capacity and neither companies are majority owned by the Chinese lol.

You're quibbling over technicalities. For most tech companies, operating in China requires a substantial relationship with Chinese owned business entities and partners, often tacitly, if not explicitly written by law, also requiring some shareholding or officer/executive relationship to manage the tangled web of CCP corruption.

I don't think anyone cares anymore. Every ad network that slips through is probably propagating whatever data they get across all other ad networks instantly, so they are probably right not to care.

Plus, mine is but a grain of sand in China's endless beaches of data. Also, the only real solution is to use a shady VPN (that is probably owned by a government anyway).

It sucks and is terrible but I think that's just the way it is unfortunately.

The fact that TikTok has something like 70 million monthly active users in the U.S. is prima facie evidence that its existence is good for American consumers, who have chosen to consume it, regardless of any potential privacy issues.

I don't mean this to trivialize China's oppressive behavior. And sometimes the right way to punish regimes like China is with economic sanctions, even when those sanctions harm us as a side-effect - I don't know if that's the right answer in this case or not. But from a purely economic point of view, tit-for-tat trade sanctions are an own goal.

Google's dragonfly would allow it to operate in China. It didn't because of domestic pressure, not the Chinese government. There used to have a huge debate of that here on Hackernews. It would not be fair to say that China banned Google for protectionism reasons. At least for China, the government have a standard, a list of censorship requirement to follow. There are things a company can do to operate in China. While here now at the US, it's protectionism that targeted a specific company without doubt. I'd hardly call that the rule of law, would you?

> Would WeChat or TikTok exist if western chat and social media apps were given total access to Chinese markets???

WeChat caters to the needs of Chinese users. As far as I know, WeChat invented integration of payments in messaging apps and Western apps like Messenger and iMessage copied that. I don't think the Western apps have QR payments, which is very important to Chinese. And I don't think a Western app would have come up with the group hongbao exchange feature.

TikTok doesn't have a surviving American equivalent so, yes. Definitely it would exist.

> Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US??

For the same reasons that China should allow American companies to operate in China.

This is correct, thank you for this reply.

Or there is actual national security issues at play they dont want to tell

TikTok has only recently had any competitors from the west, and WeChat is still far and beyond any chat platform the west has offered. I have extreme doubt the western companies would at all be able to compete in China. They don't get the culture, they have inferior features and inferior user experience.

In fact, if the west weren't so racist I suspect WeChat would dominate just like TikTok is dominating in the west.

That's the thing is that WeChat can exist in the US. In fact it does. It just doesn't get any traction except with Chinese Nationals communicating with their families.

It's kind of absurd to think that platforms that literally dominate every single country in the world like Google and Facebook wouldn't similarly dominate in China if they were just allowed. TikTok is the first Chinese social app that's had any success in the West. That's why we're talking about this now and never needed to discuss it with WeChat.

It's absolutely crazy that Chinese companies can compete fairly in Western markets yet the Chinese government can close their markets to Western companies. IMO, a trade war with China is long overdue. China hasn't played fairly in any sense . Trade wars suck for all involved but if you're not willing to do them, why would China not play by a double standard?

> It's absolutely crazy that Chinese companies can compete fairly in Western markets yet the Chinese government can close their markets to Western companies.

The actual state of affairs is that Western companies do much more business in China than vice versa. It's been that way ever since China began opening up in the 1980s.

There are more theoretical barriers to trade in China than in most developed countries, but that doesn't change the fact that there's more actual Western investment in China than vice versa. Whether China's protectionist measures (which have lessened over time) are acceptable depends on your ideas about economic development. There's a very respectable economic tradition (stretching back to Alexander Hamilton) that says that developing countries should enact certain protectionist measures. Most developed countries got where they are today using some level of protectionist policies (the US, Japan and South Korea are a few prominent examples).

I agree with much of your argument in general but you seem to skew the reality of the situation in a very big way. China is the second largest economy in the world. By GDP measures, they have a long way to go but all of that wealth and control is in the hands of a very small group of people. As a nation-state, China is extremely powerful and should be held to exactly the same standards as other powerful nation-states. From the perspective of foreign policy, the state of development is derived from the ability of a country to project power. China can absolutely do this.

Given China's autocratic government, the conflation of economic and government interests is impossible to separate. This makes protectionist policies of China a dire risk to the West. The ability of social media in particular to undermine democratic elections should now be clear. The simple unregulated profit motive of Facebook has proved harmful enough. A Chinese controlled Facebook equivalent in the United States would be disastrous.

China is still a developing country, even though it has a very large economy (due to its large population). Expecting or demanding that it remove all protectionist measures is wrong, in my opinion.

On the other hand, in these discussions, most people massively play up Chinese protectionism, and seem to have a wildly skewed picture of what the economic relationship between China and developed countries is. Claims that China excludes most Western companies are so massively at variance with reality that it's impossible to have a conversation after that.

> This makes protectionist policies of China a dire risk to the West.

The West has benefitted enormously from trade with China and investment in the country. The problem, from the perspective of the US, isn't Chinese protectionism, but rather the end of American hegemony. How far the US will go in order to maintain its position is something we should all be very worried about.

> The ability of social media in particular to undermine democratic elections should now be clear.

I don't think social media is undermining democracy. The hoopla about Russia after the last election really descended into hysteria, and there was never anything really significant uncovered. The Internet Research Agency had essentially zero impact on the election. The "worst" thing the Russians supposedly did (and I'm not sure if they actually did it) was handing DNC emails over to WikiLeaks. But it was good that those emails were published. They showed the DNC conniving against Bernie, which is something the public had a right to know about.

Again, you're misunderstanding the difference between GDP and foreign policy. China has a low GDP, which I mentioned but a giant economy. Think of it like Apple has a $1.9T market cap and 130,000 employees and Amazon has a $1.6T market cap with 800,000 employees. From a foreign policy perspective, the number of employees doesn't matter. It's only the ability to project power into other countries. China is not a developing country. It only feigns to be.

"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak" — Sun Tzu

The problem with China, again to repeat myself, is that there is significant overlap between the economic and foreign policy interests of China. Whereas American companies only care about making more money, Chinese companies want to both make money and extend Chinese influence.

This is terrible for democracies so easily swayed by unregulated emergent technologies like social media. If all you think Russia did was leak documents, I think you far underestimate their impact. An underdog candidate without majority popular support became president by the smallest margins. Democracy only works if its influenced by people who actually care if it succeeds. Foreign influence of any kind rots it at its core. This is the goal of China and Russia (although they may approve of different candidates).

This isn't a problem of America losing its hegemony in the world. It's a problem where foreign influences help elect a leader that has led to the unnecessary deaths of more than 100K Americans. The USA is no saint but China and Russia literally seek to elevate themselves at any cost. Allowing any Chinese companies influence over American citizens is an absolute disaster. They won't simply seek to make money in the USA, they will try to extend Chinese national interests at the cost of American lives.

I'm not sure if you're the type of person simply trying to seem intelligent by arguing against the popular stance or if you truly believe what you say. In either case, I don't see why a smart person such as yourself would defend the reputation of such a country. The future will judge us based on our inaction towards the suffering of the Uighurs and Tibetans.

> The problem with China, again to repeat myself, is that there is significant overlap between the economic and foreign policy interests of China.

As is the case for every country. Do you seriously believe that US foreign policy is agnostic about US companies' economic interests?

> foreign influences help elect a leader

Blaming your problems on malign foreign powers is something Trump would do. The US elected Trump. Blaming his election on Russia is ridiculous.

This really sounds like a new Red Scare. The Democrats tried it with Russia after the 2016 election, and the Republicans are trying it with China now. The US has plenty of its own problems. Blaming foreign influence is ridiculous.

> The future will judge us based on our inaction towards the suffering of the Uighurs and Tibetans.

Or on the destructive actions we were manipulated into supporting through atrocity propaganda. Every few years, the US public is told about some new ultimate evil it must face. How many times will this pattern be repeated before people learn? Iraqi society destroyed. Libyan society destroyed. Syrian society destroyed.

Everything is a spectrum. The USA is by no means perfect nor exempt from many criticisms. But if you are truly unwilling to acknowledge the differences along that spectrum then any discussion between us is pointless. I hope both the USA and China find ways to lessen the ceaseless suffering in the world. I have some hope for the US. I have little hope for any autocracy.

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