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Comment by kwonkicker | Hacker News Reader

I believe nobody said "evil boogyman". But saying "government controlled" isn't much of a stretch for any Chinese company. I expect they do have some level of "de facto" control on over any company operating in the Mainland

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I think that's not a reasonable expectation. Unless you believe that setting regulatory clauses in doing business as "de facto" control. But then so does any business.

Much like every other nation on Earth, the government will seek to take a hand in the largest businesses operating in their jurisdiction.

"Expecting" the Chinese government to control every business in China is very dystopian and baseless. They couldn't do it even if they wanted. The same way my country can't regulate a simple scooter ride-sharing startup during a pandemic...

I wouldn't question China's control over companies like Alibaba. I wouldn't question the US' control over companies like Google. Which again is a totally different ballpark.

My understanding is there has been a large push to have communist party members have a formal and active role in businesses. The economist had a nice article on this: https://archive.is/HGX2L

This is at the very least much more explicit than the control political parties in the US exert over businesses.

In the US, "human resources" is a misnomer for a corporate department that ensures regime compliance. Thankfully, most policies exist for the sake of worker's and minority's rights.

Being explicit in your doings is not necessarily evil. Governments frequently push to control everything that they think might benefit themselves. China just has everyone's balls in a vice and so can do it publicly.

But yeah. I'm only here to say that equating control of giants to be very different to control of everyone.

Every government has some level of "de facto" control over companies through legislation and whatnot. Sure that control may be more direct in China (and that's a big maybe in my opinion because I doubt a huge country with complex interactions can be handwavely summarized as that) but I just don't see the need to bring that up whenever anything happens in China.

then you've probably never worked in the Chinese tech sector because it is the literal Wild West. The competitor manipulation story in this case is utterly believable to anyone who has ever seen in what kind of quasi feudal wars Chinese tech companies are often engaged, because there is virtually no government oversight. Regulators on the mainland were generally so far behind the curve that tech companies until very recently more or less did whatever they wanted, which accounts for their enormous growth over the last two decades.

About ten years ago there was the infamous "3Q war" where Tencent and Qihoo engaged in pretty ridiculous measures over the messenger market by blocking each others usage on consumer machines when the other one was installed, orchestrating fake media articles about pornography, police raids and at some point calling on users to go into a general strike. The war basically only ended because at some point the government stepped in and for the first time enforced anti-trust law.

This has changed to some degree but China's tech sector always was so hilariously under-regulated it makes most Western countries look socialist in comparison

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