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Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Reality is that while China blocks Facebook, Google, etc and smartly props up their own clones, it’s “aghast” at the American protectionism and xenophobic behaviour. How dare the Americans block a Chinese app?! China is not a democracy. It’s not interested in fairness. China is playing the long game. Just like the wars of the past were fought with little toy armies of a few thousand knights and noblemen marching into each other’s countries until someone decided to conscript their whole nation into battle, the West is fighting allowing China to pilfer its technology, wreak the environment, and compete with state backed organisations. Wanna compete with Huawei? Good luck sending in your company noblemen, China is sending their whole nation behind it.

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There's a difference, facebook did not attempt to run its social media business in China, and Google voluntarily quit so it doesn't have to comply to censorship law. Meanwhile Tiktok has a US branch and is complying with laws in the US.

China has a restrictive internet where if you want to operate, you have to comply with a certain set of rules that are unsavory to say the least. Facebook, Google decided to not bother instead of complying to those rules, but they very well could have, Bing and Amazon is in China.

Tiktok's US branch did not violate any US law and its being prosecuted with administrative action, which is why your equivalence is false - The actual equivalence would be to make laws that enforces ownership for social media companies and make them store their content in location. And enforce those laws, like China did.

I don't think you realize how impossible it is to enter the Chinese market... Google wasted a ton of money trying to enter the US market (I recommend watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XImsSgdr4fg), and Facebook did too. Look at how it went for Uber.

If you want to give an example of a US company that is doing much better in China, it's Apple, and the sole reason is that everybody who works for the Chinese government owns an iPhone.

BTW I was living in China when Facebook got banned, it was in 2008 when it started becoming popular outside of the US. Nobody saw it coming, and obviously there was no way for Facebook to go back into that market once the CCP decided against that.

There's probably a way, register facebook.cn and allow censors to censor content, store everything in a data center somewhere in China, people has to use ID to register, etc.

At which point it doesn't make much sense to operate in China.

This is also precisely why TikTok is not available in mainland China, because it doesn't meet those standards.

tiktok is available in mainland China, it's called douyin

> the sole reason is that everybody who works for the Chinese government owns an iPhone.

Not only that, a large portion of iPhones are manufactured in China, which sustains enormous supply chains and jobs there.

There are plenty of American companies that are doing fine in the China market. The automakers, Starbucks, even Disney does okay. Apple is doing alright, supposedly.

Tech companies don't do well because they tend to be staffed by people who 1. rebel against authority and 2. think that the liberal / anarchist parts of Western culture are the best way of doing things. What Uber did pissed off people in San Francisco, so it's small wonder the authorities would come down hard on them in China.

The word on the street is that people in China thought Googlers (and American software engineers by extension) were a tad insufferable and arrogant. One ought to be warned, that being arrogant is a surefire way to get people to beat you at any cost. And to be clear, I fit in that category myself.

At some point, I got off the high horse as far as China-this, China-that. Why? Partly because it didn't really seem important anymore, and partly because a lot of things that you can criticize China about, the U.S. has done as bad, and I don't like being hypocritical to that degree. You know what politicians like to do when things aren't so great? Point fingers at someone who's "worse." So really, in my view of things, FB and GOOG not succeeding in China would be a small price to pay for actually paying attention to things not right in the U.S.

Aren’t there restrictions that the companies need to be 51% owned by local interests? And issues with IP transfer, etc.

Precisely, that's what I'm talking about, if you think the US should adopt the same restriction, maybe ask your representative to pass such a law then.

Do you think it’s a coincidence Xiaomi keeps producing very good smartphones and other tech?

Do you think it's a coincidence that after iPhone 4 all smartphone looks more or less the same?

These restrictions are gone. China changed their laws.

Citation? In all markets, or just in select non-essential ones?

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9aca6c56-fe41...

They have decreased in scope but they are not gone.

I get what you’re saying, it’s a very smart point of view. China has enacted absurd, oppressive laws which it interprets conveniently in favour of the party when it wants. However it wants to enjoy all the freedoms awarded to the rest of the western democratic and capitalist world, defended by their laws. It’s the old communist adage: Socialism for other, private property for me.

> interprets conveniently in favour of the party when it wants.

When the laws are written in such away you don't have to interpret it. Western companies that follows those laws like locals are fine - e.g. Apple. Apple Store/Cloud in China store all their info in Guizhou and presumably with agreed access for government on demand, just like all local businesses.

I wonder under what circumstances this ban is acceptable. I'm no expert on international law, but even if the charges are Trumped up (pun intended), espionage / security concerns are very likely on the list.

> facebook did not attempt to run its social media business in China

This is not true: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/24/17607992/facebook-allowed...

Facebook attempts to open an office in China, but gets shutdown one day later. Ofc, this is China so nobody knows the reason why.

Second, Chinese internet regulation is as opaque as its other operations, compliance with law is on the surface, they are tens of special government approved certificates to obtain if you want to actually operate there, like this one: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BD%91%E7%BB%9C%E8%A7%86%E5%..., which is approved case by case and notoriously hard to get, basically make it impossible for foreign company to operate in China.

So no, China's internet doesn't have only have a set of rules that once you comply you get a pass. It is mired in layers of regulations and bureaucracy that without guanxi, you can't crack it no matter how willing you are.

> Ofc, this is China so nobody knows the reason why.

I'd assume facebook know? Also your link does not seem related quote(Facebook opens a subsidiary in China, a breakthrough for the banned social media platform)

There is the follow-up you requested:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17612162/facebook-technol...

> The sudden rejection stems from a disagreement between Chinese authorities, the source told the Times. Local officials in Zhejiang, an eastern province that houses Alibaba’s headquarters, gave Facebook the initial permission, but the Cyberspace Administration of China, Beijing’s internet regulator, had not.

You are completely mistaken if you think simply complying with local laws will allow you to succeed in the Chinese market.

I don't think that, nor do I think that is true anywhere on this planet.

Parent’s keyword is “allow to succeed”, not “succeed”. I always warn people about false equivalence when it comes to China. The laws and rules in China are not the same concept as laws and rules in the West. There are implicit rules or 潜规则. The rules and laws are only there to make things look legit. There are very few places on earth where you can be forced into citizenship so you can be deprived of consular access and be dealt with using the convenience of Chinese rules and tools[1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-sentences-bookseller-gui-...

This is insane.

China abducts a Swedish citizen; recognizes and prosecutes him as citizen of China, denying Sweden access to the trial (note that China does not even have double citizenship); when concerns are raised over violations of Vienna treaty on consular relations—and hey, by this logic China can abduct anyone anywhere—China declares that (I am not joking) consular relations are on hold until COVID-19 is resolved.

How on Earth is anyone OK with this?

It's not like he is wholly unrelated to China, though. This is kinda similar to Davit Isak and probably numerous other people

I cannot locate anything about the person you refer to, but that doesn’t matter. “Not wholly unrelated” is a very weak justification for an abduction of a foreign citizen (especially where “not unrelated” means “wrote about some country’s politics”), and unilaterally declaring international consular relations “suspended”. “What about Y” does not mean X should be tolerated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawit_Isaak

Yep, as I thought… Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Sorry mate, that got misspelled. Yes, I agree with you an all those points, but to totally disregard the fact that the person is of chinese origin and a former chinese citizen is not giving the whole picture.

In the case of Isaak, people in sweden seem to think he was some kind of stockholm journalist when he was merely swabbing the floors of a swedish news agency. Not to discredit him of course, I was actually a cleaner myself at one point ... But to simply refer to him as an "abducted swedish journalist" very much leaves the full picture unpainted. More accurately he was a political refugee in sweden and oppositional activist in eritrea, and I think he wrote a newsletter there as well or some kind of newspaper.

In any case, hope they all go free soon, poor people.

Abducted and prosecuted a Swedish citizen. The “journalist” part is not important is it?

A big difference between China and Eritrea is that one of those is a nuclear power, and it has just unilaterally declared consular relations as suspended when Sweden demanded access to its citizen. This is insane.

Global discourse about China mainland politics must be bias-corrected in a way that people with strong opinions and actual knowledge of how things work there will likely self-censor, unless they align with CCP.

If no one writes about some damning thing X in the US, there is a high likelihood that X doesn’t happen. If no one writes about damning thing Z in China, this tells us nothing. They could just fear for their lives—and it doesn’t matter where that person lives, which country’s citizen they are, whether they have been granted asylum, etc.

The demands China makes of foreign companies are obscene.

While any company's welfare can suffer when diplomatic relations between nations sour, as evidenced by TikTok, there really is no comparison between operating a business in China and operating in most other developed markets.

mate, I appreciate your comments personally as I've done business in 3 continents over last 15+ years and I can agree where you are going with this.

But you're not going to convince anyone on a western forum about this. Obviously I'm generalising but the process people have is loosely:

failure to understand how other people (ie 1.4 billion) operate -> their laws don't work like ours -> their laws are unfair and therefore must be corrupt

Of course they don't abstract the principles upwards ie that an important part of modern sense of liberty is letting people run the system they want. They feel there's no contradiction with that and trying to impose their system on others and using their own system as the only yardstick because they're saving these heathens from eternal damnation.

Alao a lot of those arguments I see in this thread could be applied to many other countries, but everyone just wants to blame China.

Yeah, the “certain set of rules” that many western companies have followed are sometimes no different in result than what is being asked of ByteDance.

It is fair to ask whether the US should be engaging in these tactics (I don’t think we should), but the suggestion that the US is doing something on a level that China wouldn’t is just false.

>There's a difference, facebook did not attempt to run its social media business in China, and Google voluntarily quit so it doesn't have to comply to censorship law. Meanwhile Tiktok has a US branch and is complying with laws in the US.

>China has a restrictive internet where if you want to operate, you have to comply with a certain set of rules that are unsavory to say the least. Facebook, Google decided to not bother instead of complying to those rules, but they very well could have, Bing and Amazon is in China.

Is that an accurate portrayal of events? Google did attempt to get into China more than a decade ago, and more recently with Dragonfly[0] which was shut down after word got out.

As for Facebook, one cannot look at all the relationship strengthening between its CEO and Xi Jinping and not think there is nothing behind that.

The point is that to say that Facebook and Google voluntarily quit or didn't even bother because of the reasons cited in the comment surely could be improved for accuracy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

This is pure disinformation.

> Tiktok's US branch did not violate any US law and its being prosecuted with administrative action

Seriously? That was already in 2019:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-pay-5-7-millio...

This case it's fine. There is a due process. Hard evidence is brought forth, court ruled in according to law. Where is the due process for handing the sentencing that prevents tiktok from transaction with US persons in the first EO. White House also gets to define transaction as whatever they want. Salary to US employees? App store listing? Ad transaction? White House can play tiktok however they please.

> facebook did not attempt to run its social media business in China

It actually did attempt to do that, pretty hard. Zuck even learned quite a bit of Mandarin Chinese and spoke in it in China to students during a publicity tour. He's not stupid, he knows there's a lot of money in China. But Xi is also not stupid, so he's not going to let a US media company to have unimpeded access to almost all of his subjects, which it could then algorithmically brainwash. So it was not to be. Google didn't "voluntarily quit" either. It quit because it discovered it's being spied on and had its IP stolen - both of those things are a fact of life for any significant Western company operating in China. So yea, forgive me for not shedding a tear for TikTok.

Whatever your stance on if TikTok should be banned, it's concerning that the CEO of their largest competitor is able to dictate government policy to potentially remove them from the market. And Facebook is the only large tech player with this direct access to the Whitehouse.

The decision should be based on what's best for the US and for the market as a whole; not what's best for Facebook.

> what's best for the US and for the market as a whole; not what's best for Facebook.

I'd say Facebooks view is the difference is only temporary, much like China's view on the world

> "fairness"

The world is more complex than that. China is not "bad" because it is not a democracy. China is "bad" because it competes with the USA.

There are other countries that are not a democracy an that are allies with the USA, like Saudi Arabia. But they are "good", apparently.

And also, just remember that the USA only supports the democracies that are aligned with the way of thinking. Just do a bit of research and see what happened to South America in the 70s' and 80's... and more recently to Bolivia.

Also, most of the products that you use today were built, at least in part, in China.

> The world is more complex than that. China is not "bad" because it is not a democracy. China is "bad" because it competes with the USA.

China is bad because it is a horrific human rights abuser without democratic elections. You march to the beat of the CCP drum or you're removed. You're also severely disadvantaged if you aren't Han Chinese. The Uighurs are being systematically exterminated, and they're not the only ones that suffer.

The US isn't perfect. Our immigration laws and history of racism, sexism, and homophobia leave much to be desired. But we're not a dictatorship and we're a net force for good. I'd rather be a US citizen than a Chinese one.

Most of the world recognizes that China is becoming worrisomely powerful, and we've collectively decided that we need to put them back in check. Thankfully Xi is flexing all of China's muscles in an early show of strength, which has gotten the world's attention. Nobody wants totalitarian China to be the dominant superpower. Xi played his hand early, and now the walls are about to cave in.

As impressive as China's domestic capabilities look, they have an aging population with a huge gender imbalance that will bite them in a few short decades. If the world decouples manufacturing and supply chains from China over this same time period, China is going to have significant problems. They're not as self-sufficient as they look. They're an importer of energy and food, and without exports they won't be able to sustain their growth internally.

The world is trying to knee-cap China, and it makes sense.

it feels like you haven't really responded to the post you're replying to. the point they were making is that if that's what this was about, that standard would be enforced against saudi arabia as well.

It's probably because I agree with the OP's assessment, though they seemed impartial or critical of anti-China sentiment.

I happen to think what we are doing is justified and an imperative to maintaining our way of life.

This seems like it could have been a copy-pasted block that is answered at comments with certain keywords (not that I think it is).

That is to say, it has very little to do with the arguments of the comment it replies to, or outright ignores them. It is good to engage people you reply to instead of talking at them.

Such anti-China sentiments worry me because these are precisely the kinds of thinking (on both sides) that lead to over-generalisation and refusal to be in one another’s shoes.

Imagine 20 years from now Mars settlement has started to become reality. And most earthlings are still stuck at the primitive notions of dividing people and labeling things in overly generalised categories like the abstract notions of sovereign states.

I just hope when we have finally colonised Mars people who settle down in this otherworld are not as divided as we currently are.

No doubt martians will find other silly ways to divide themselves.

    Domers rule, ok?
    Tunnels Tunnels #1! #1!

    We use sols.
    They use mars seconds.

At least martians will be able to agree their chronology has a Year Zero?

I don't understand if this has to be considered an answer to the previous post, it sound more like a reaction

But if

> China is bad because it is a horrific human rights abuser without democratic elections.

What about US where people have SIX times the chances of being shot and killed in the streets?

(1 every 100k VS 6 every 100k)

I mean: safety is a human right, especially in democratic western supposedly civilized countries

To find another country with such bad homicide stats you have to look at undeveloped countries run by criminal cartels or warlords

I think your American centric view gave you some blind spots

For once

>As impressive as China's domestic capabilities look, they have an aging population with a huge gender imbalance that will bite them in a few short decades.

Europe is in the same situation, it doesn't mean Europe will disappear

Japan is in a worse situation, but it's still the third economy in the World for GDP

> If the world decouples manufacturing and supply chains from China over this same time period, China is going to have significant problems.

You forgot (or you don't know) that China is practically colonizing Africa, which is gonna be the next big thing and has a lot of younger work force available, not considering that with 1.3 billion population is gonna be one of the largest markets in the World

USA has only 320 million citizen and only 80% of them are American born.

You also forgot that China is the United States' 3rd largest goods export market

It's also the third largest market for Apple devices.

China is also the largest supplier for USA, which means that on one side China get a lot of benefits trading on the US market, but also that USA without China goods is not gonna work the same way.

BTW this is about Facebook. Zuckerberg is just killing a competitor. This has nothing to do with freedom, it's about money. Just like Epic vs Apple.

I don't care if China is aghast at American protectionism and xenophobia. I'm aghast, because as an American citizen, I'm interested in fairness and I hate protectionism and xenophobia, and that's what I think America is about.

If you're telling me that neither this nation nor any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure, and that we have to fight unfairness with unfairness, you're telling me that my loyalty to America itself is misplaced.

if you're interested in fairness, your loyalty probably is misplaced

On the global spectrum of fairness, the US is inarguably top-tier. The US is often compared to other western nations, not because they are so different, but because they are very similar. The top 15 or so countries are all neck and neck, but there’s a big wide field behind those ones.

At the end of the day the gleaming platitudes of Americanism (the stuff about fairness, equality etc) start to bump up against the reality of geopolitics. It's an unfair game, and pretending that China will eventually embrace what could colloquially be referred to as the Western approach to setting up markets like this is naive at best and dangerous at worst. It's not that your loyalty is misplaced, it's that I think you've misunderstood the game being played here.

Sure, so - what does the American approach have to recommend it? Why shouldn't I leave for China, the apparent winning team?

Not the parent you're responding to but the answer I see is that in the modern understanding of geopolitics (like 19th century and onwards), "fairness" and "values" aren't considerations at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik

This is an active topic of discussion actually. In general the trinity of qualities that result in a "strong in the real way" country have been approached as realism, nationalism, and liberty. The scholarly community is currently in conflict because in the modern era one of these things is seemingly very unimportant compared to the others.

Previously, it was believed that liberty contributed to economic output for a myriad of reasons that boil down to "free markets". There's an emerging, albeit more romantically framed, belief that diversity and too much liberty are actually handicaps because both can retard a government's ability to engage in realist policy while, at the same time, deminishing the homoginizing effects of nationalism which has its own independent benefits but which also acts as a lubricant for realist action. This is not to say all assumptions and observations about liberal policies have been wrong, it's more about re-assessing our understanding about the magnitude and utility of these effects.

Please point me to some of this discussion. I'm very interested, especially if it relates to technology development and the requisite supply chains involved.

By all means, if that’s how you feel, you should explore that possibility.

Fairness, values, work on smaller scales. When you get to city/state/country scale, like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, China, US do - it’s not a good strategy because your opponents/peers have no alternative but to deal with you, and unless you are going on an all out war, it’s mostly slap and tickle regardless of what you actually do.

This is a hard question, to be completely honest. Let me put it this way: I think that if the goal is maximizing the potential for accruing power and influence for your country, the Chinese system is probably better in the long run - especially in the post-post 9/11 world. The American system offers stronger fundamentals (no nasty fertility cliff in ~15 years, a strong but increasingly fractured understanding of global responsibility, a law system that still does protect political speech) but a less clear approach on how, exactly, the government is going to ensure this prosperity gravy train that we’ve been riding since the Soviet Union fell continues.

As an American business owner, in my experience reality has no concern for “fairness” but is constructed by leverage and power.

As an American business owner, do you believe in the rule of law or the rule by law? Do you think any appearance of shifting to the latter would have an impact on the business environment?

If I understand your argument correctly, my response is the same, that the "of law" or "by law" has no bearing and never has.

People/organizations/governments will do what they have the leverage and power to get away with. If you, or your organization, or your government, don't/doesn't agree with the direction, then leverage and power are your means to change the situation. Those that have the power to make/change the laws, make/change laws.

Countries sent small armies into battle for good reason - until the industrial revolution sending 1m men into a foreign country would have involved the overwhelming majority of those men starving to death due to lack of supplies.

American values are way more important to the success of the U.S. than whether we have the #1 social media app in the world or whatever.

The U.S. rose to its current position by being a nation of values and principles--by sticking by them even through tough times, and encouraging their adoption elsewhere. That's the real long game. And right now we're losing it... actually no, this isn't something we can lose to someone else. We're forfeiting it. We're abandoning our best advantage.

We can't beat China by becoming China. And more to the point, China does not have to lose for the U.S. (or anyone else) to win.

What does this have to do with Zuck?

My issue with this story (if it's indeed true) is that the motive for"stoking fears" was entirely self serving and has nothing to do with selflessly advising the government on some blind spot.

If you recall just a few years ago he was speaking at Chinese universities, getting photo ops in front of Tiananmen Square, and even asked Xi to name his unborn baby! He was all in on fawning over China when he thought there was a chance Facebook could "get in" and then took everything back as soon as he realized it was impossible.

So because China doesn't play fair the west doesn't play fair too? So the west becomes like China? Guess China wins because the have proven that the west isn't any better than them. We fell into their trap.

"Turn the other cheek" sounds nice in grade school and self-help blogs, but you can't just let yourself get taken advantage of in order to maintain some arbitrary moral high ground.

It has nothing to do with moral high ground. It's about being the better alternative and about and free markets. But now everybody knows the US will play dirty to protect their it predominance. The way the US acted against Huawei and TikTok showed what could happen to anybody who opposes the will of the US. Even the EU now is looking for alternatives for the IT tech giants. The trust is gone.

No, it shows that the US will no longer tolerate state subsidized corporations from supplanting other corporations trying to play by the rules.

Come on, the US an playing by the rules? The used Echelon to help Boing winning a contract against Airbus. The EU only stopped the investigation because 9/11 happend.

I don't really see how most of this is actually relevant to TikTok or all the drama surrounding it. The point of western societies is that certain things like art and speech are considered worthy of bestowing protections upon. TikTok is a platform that mixes speech and art and it's immensely popular with American youth who aren't allowed to advocate for themselves politically due to age. Why is it alright to block their access to a platform with these properties simply because it's politically convenient, especially when many of these same youths also use TikTok as a medium for artistic expression?

What China thinks about app blocking is irrelevant. The issue is about what fellow Americans, Europeans, and the rest of the western world think. Censoring apps is a massive departure from our own values, and compromising the values our society is built on just to race to the bottom with China will lead us to ruin. If black box content editorialization is a problem, let us push back market wide instead of picking on lone targets for being more overtly unaccountable.

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