In return for that china allowed the world to export its pollution and manufacturing . Those are trade-offs

This! Until China is fully open and non-totalitarian, they don't have any right to complain.

You can do all that easily in HKSAR, but you're mostly correct about the mainland. (technically you don't need a Chinese ID, just a permanent residence)

When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match or reach a fraction of China’s (and hopefully would enable future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden has maintained that course and the public has come around to more hawkish policy.

Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.

Funnily enough, spinning a cloud VM is quite easy actually. You can do it in seconds on Alibaba Cloud. Getting port 80 unblocked on the other hand...

Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.

How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.

Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.

Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...

When the product is commercializing and manipulating its users, though, things aren’t so clear. Is it a gift, or a Trojan horse? That’s the open question here, regardless of Congress’s demagogic motives.

> banning superior foreign products and services mean that people have to use inferior local substitutes.

TikTok is only superior in poisoning the minds of people using it here in US. That's why the Chinese version is different. I think zero is lost if people use the inferior local ones in this case.

> This logic is "they make themselves worse off, so we should match them". That is lose-lose scenario logic.

Sure, the optimal solution for the prisoner's dilemma is that both cooperate. But once one doesn't cooperate, the optimal solution is not to cooperate. US looks like a dummy waving the flag of morality while China laughs in its face.

What is China aiming for? Dumbing down hundreds of millions of westerners while their own population only sees "better" content?

Is that a red herring?

The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.

The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.

Banning TikTok even runs counter to the value we hear used to justify the first amendment: diversity of thought and discourse is inherently good; it allows people to decide for themselves using their faculties of rationality. We even have Benjamin Franklin and polemic if not mis-attributed Voltaire quotes[1] used to inspire a basis for free speech.

Except for some reason, diversity of thought and free speech ideals aren't actually used to justify speech people disagree with, namely China's. This two-mouthed approach is noticed. It de-legitimizes the diversity of thought value.

To anyone who has argued for free speech before but is silent now, your silence says more than your speech ever could.

1. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/01/defend-say/

This is a ridiculously naive take.

Banning the operation of a foreign-controlled corporation from a state that harshly restricts foreign economic activities in their borders is hardly a first amendment issue. It's not even close.

[EDIT] Case law citations would be a lot more convincing than downvotes.

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them"

America should unconditionally extend freedom to its own citizens, but not to agents of foreign governments that don't reciprocate in kind.