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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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'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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

These restrictions are gone. China changed their laws.

They have decreased in scope but they are not gone.

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

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

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?

>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)

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

This is pure disinformation.

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.

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