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Comment by euix | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article in Bloomberg just now: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/bytedance....

The kicker is at the end:

“He thought that by making a promise to follow international standards or rules he would be able to escape the regulation or the kind of pressure from the American government,” said Ding. “But I think now he realizes he might have been wrong and that if he doesn’t want to sell the company, the only one who can help him is the Chinese government -- which is what he’s tried to avoid the past few years.”

It's the same with Huawei, if Huawei wasn't a government owned or backed company before, after the U.S. tried to kneecap it, it sure as hell will become one if only to survive.

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Exactly. My understanding is that ByteDance has tried to maintain some distance with the Chinese government in the past, but this pressure from the US essentially forces it to reverse course.

It's antithetical to the US's purported objective of promoting a more liberalized market economy in China (though I suppose that was never something this administration really cared about).

Maybe it's a next level play the more hardline authoritarian China becomes the easier it is to rally the domestic population to be anti-Chinese in all matters. Remember when terrorists created sectarian violence in Iraq for the sole purpose of inciting ethnic conflict?

I wouldn't have believed it was possible even 5 years ago in the U.S. but now who knows.

Indeed. Though given this administration's history I'm more inclined to believe there is no grand strategy, I'm sure such a play would be effective.

>It's antithetical to the US's purported objective of promoting a more liberalized market economy in China (though I suppose that was never something this administration really cared about).

You're missing the context behind why that policy was in place. A big part of that was the hope that China would democratize in the process. Clearly that has not happened so it makes sense to pull the plug. No point giving out free concessions to trade partners that aren't willing to reciprocate.

It was never about giving "free concessions." It was about opening up China to foreign investment, so that foreign companies could make returns. It's difficult to overstate just how massively foreign companies profited from trade liberalization with China.

Foreign companies were able to earn large returns in China because China's tariffs went from ~40% to ~3%, restrictions on foreign investment were reduced or eliminated in most sectors, big state-owned enterprises were split up and forced to operate like regular companies that have to earn a profit, IP courts were created, along with many other changes large and small.

The sudden cries that China took advantage of the West are just completely out of touch with reality.

I wouldn't put any amount of trust in their claimed independence from the CCP. After all, that's exactly what a CCP vehicle for foreign intelligence ops would say.

Of course there's plenty of reason to be skeptical, but given that the CCP have taken down ByteDance's apps in the past leads to me to believe that they're less willing to cooperate, whereas companies like Tencent seem fully aligned with the CCP.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-bytedance/china-ord...

Its already controlled by the CCP...

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