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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

This is not a good analysis. Their proposition is that anything that is for Freedom of Expression is banned in China. I think their examples: Google, Xhamster, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Bitcoin are examples that that is not what is happening at all. I don't think any of these promote freedom of expression, whatsoever. Especially when you consider that these companies have recently made it a their mission to influence politics and culture in the United States.

This is China wanting to stop foreign influence, and also more importantly protect their own companies. China has video sharing and micro blogging and social networks. Is it really evil intent that China allowed these local companies to form instead of ceding to foreign monopolies?

Bitcoin while proponents talk about how its freedom and the revolution to tech that the blockchain will be, has produced nothing more than something to gamble on in the stock market.

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Why not both? The CCP has strong state censorship on all native platforms. If they allowed Reddit or Google, that would allow their populace to access unmoderated (from their point of view) platforms, which is not acceptable. They allow expression, just with more and stricter limits than in the west.

> has produced nothing more than something to gamble on in the stock market

So then why did China ban it?

> "This is China wanting to stop foreign influence, and also more importantly protect their own companies. China has video sharing and micro blogging and social networks. Is it really evil intent that China allowed these local companies to form instead of ceding to foreign monopolies?"

what is a bit confusing to me is how they are crushing any company that gets successful. I invested in alibaba because I figured China realized having a strong and successful tech sector is critical to their goals of hegemony, but then they just crushed them and any other company that pops up. So when my friend said 'what about Didi', I was like stay away, china will hit them like the next wakamole, and they did within days.

I really don't know what their game is, but they are up to something.

It's really not my intention to turn this into a political flame wars, but isn't there stuff in the works by the Biden administration now to clamp down on industry hegemonies (e.g. "big tech") in the name of healthy competition? How's that different? IMHO, what China is doing strikes me as having the same rationale, with it looking like protectionism against foreign powers being just a side effect. EU doesn't look too kindly on the American flavor of corporate warfare either, for example.

With this said, I think the CCP's rationale for Alibaba is different from their rationale for crypto. One other commenter mentioned something that I think is quite valid: China has a capital exodus problem; there are a non-trivial number of people who got rich through corruption who want to hide money outside of the country and China has been aggressively clamping down on this via exchange controls and other measures. Brazil has a similar problem (though not to the extent of banning the purchase of foreign capital over a threshold) and it tries to keep track of it via taxation. Brazil started to treat outgoing crypto like it does foreign currency purchases, China just looks to be doing the same, but using China's policy framework.

> "How's that different?"

How does that matter?

I am not speaking on Biden's actions or intentions, I am speaking on China's. I am also not speaking on what is 'right' or 'wrong'. just that is confusing given their stated goals.

IMHO, it matters precisely because if we don't ascribe preconceptions of right vs wrong (particularly when that tends to be married to US-vs-China narratives), neither of the efforts seems like illogical courses of action, nor all that different at all in the first place.

Is it really confusing that a communist government doesn't like monopolistically-inclined companies? How so? Shouldn't that be a given, all other things considered?

First off, China isn't a traditional communist country, so the idea of corporations is already kind of weird. 2ndly, China is already apart of the companies and run many aspects of the companies. Therefore, much like how companies in the US are effectively weapons used by the US government, so are the Chinese companies. Therefore it makes no sense to destroy your weapons. I actually don't think this works out very well for China. I think it ends very, very poorly. but time will tell.

I dunno, I don't so much care how close to a book a regime looks. There are also people that criticize American's flavor of democracy, for example. At the end of the day, regardless of what books say, there's only fuzzy real world implementations of said ideologies.

Amazon strikes me as being about as close to weaponizing capitalism as it gets, and that isn't exactly a shining beacon of social perfection.

Ironically, Amazon sells a bunch of chinese stuff made by companies you've never heard of, whereas commerce of American brands in China is... yohoho and a bottle of rum.

I'd say it's far easier for China to ban global sticking-out-like-a-sore-thumb giants like twitter whereas I'd say US' economic reliance on the chinese constellation of businesses is a tough nut to crack. I guess time will tell indeed.

Bitcoin mainly was used to escape the limitations of currency transfer. Gambling on the chinese stockmarket is of very limited value.

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