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Comment by kgdiem | Hacker News Reader

This is really difficult for me. I have an app that is available in every country except for China because it isn’t allowed to be published there.

In that vein it seems fair and probably doesn’t go far enough — Chinese citizens are free to publish whatever they want in the US while we’re severely restricted on conducting trade in China.

On the other hand, I’d love access to that market and would prefer trade negotiations rather than tit for tat disputes like this that won’t further the interests of American businesses (outside of Meta and Snapchat)

The app https://dailydao.app

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The West was greedy and saw a trillion dollar opportunity in welcoming China into the WTO in 2000 and gave China massive leeway (this is my opinion, and probably not a majority opinion).

In my opinion (only speaking for Germany, as I follow mostly the politics here) nobody was very keen on asking questions and making demand when the Chinese were producing our shit for pennies on the dollar but buying our premium Mercedes Benz S Classes Long Lines (and similar high technology products) by the millions.

Who would've thunk that the turntables would've, well turned...

I'm not blaming China for this btw, they played their hand very well

There would no problems at all if China continues to make shirts, shoes etc...

But China started to make some high end stuff, such as Computers, and it did those so well that it could probably render US competitors irrelevant in the next a couple of decades. So all drama started.

No, it hasn't. Never seen anything relatively nice from a Chinese company, even when it's another one of their piles of manure with a different name like OnePlus.

In consumer drones, DJI is the undisputed champion.

In consumer 3D printers, Bambu has revolutionized the market.

Don't mistake the crap they make without any quality control then sell on Aliexpress by shady shops with the serious stuff their industry is perfectly capable of design and produce. Now we could debate that millions of people buying the former contributed also to the latter, that is probably the case, but one sure fact is that they can make extremely advanced stuff at very convenient prices. Denying that because of one's nationalistic views won't change anything, unfortunately. We need to understand how to counter that in a positive way, that is, being better, not blocking their products. Now, how do you develop an industry compared to the Chinese without transforming workers into underpaid drones with no civil liberties? That's likely the one question no western politician would like to hear, because they'd have no answer.

I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.

Of course Western companies have made a lot of money off China with cheap labor and massive marketplace, so it wasn't entirely an altruistic endeavour.

Western powers still make deals with authoritarian/non-democratic states. At this point is naive to think that the grievances with china are because “they are not democratic”.

>At this point is naive to think that the grievances with china are because “they are not democratic”.

No, the kid gloves are off because "they are not democratic." It's like being nice to the weird kid in school and the weird kid steals your lunch. No more being nice to the weird kid.

Also, consider if they were democratic, we might not be having the grievances we are currently having.

So how do you explain our relashionship with countries like Saudi Arabia? Because forget the bully, thats like being friends with the school shooter.

What does that have to do with anything I said? Do you think we ally with countries for moral reasons? We allied with Stalin after he invaded Poland with Germany earlier in the same war.

that school shooter is rich af, and as much as everyone hates them, can lever that over the whole school.

Because geopolitics is a game where ALL the players are sociopaths and Saudi Arabia is basically too small for their government's admitted craziness to even register.

Let’s be real. The kid gloves would be off for any country, democratic or otherwise, that tries to compete on economic throughput and global influence with the US.

Unless you’re trying to argue that the rapid economic growth happened because they are not democratic, the idea that democracy has any relevance on US relations is laughable propaganda.

If the countries were really school kids, then I might accommodate for the idea that the school bully actually believes that he’s no longer nice to the weird kid because he’s weird. But even if some US citizens are childish, countries are not school kids.

I think if you look past the last few news cycles and back into the 70s and especially the 90s, you'll better understand what our strategy with China has been.

>I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.

Which part of that do you disagree with?

I guess I disagree with everything. But mostly I disagree that anyone serious actually thought that entering on a global marketplace would turn any kind of nation democratic... but I mean people at the top can have any kind of ideologies, I shouldn't consider impossible that somebody actually bought the magical markets propaganda.

>But mostly I disagree that anyone serious actually thought that entering on a global marketplace would turn any kind of nation democratic...

There's certainly research on the subject.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-integration-and-tran...

Exploiting improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation that occurred since the 1960s, and combining survey data with country level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, the authors document that trade with democracies increases both citizens’ support for democracy and countries’ democracy scores. Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.

According to our results, doubling trade with democracies (a change in exposure equivalent to the inter-quartile range in our sample) increases an individual’s support for democracy by 0.58 points on a 1 to 4 scale. This is similar to the difference in attitudes towards democracy between Mexico and Norway, or that between Philippines and Italy. At the country level, our estimates imply that increasing trade with democratic partners by 80% (or its inter-quartile range) raises the democracy score by around 4 points (on a scale from -10 to +10). This is equivalent to the gap between Malaysia and Canada in 2010, or that between Turkey and Senegal in 2015.

Hey, I may give it a full read later, but so far the abstract seems sound.

>Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.

And actually it’s good that there’s research about it. Different correlations between economic and political attitudes are interesting, I believe that the relation is from the political to the economic side, not otherwise yet, my biggest gripe is, that the idea that markets would result into democracy is a big assertion with shaky foundations.

And I mean, is not like we don’t have history of countries trying to open other’s markets, sometimes even forcefully. I saw the same, now dressed with modern ideologies.

China is already democratic tho. They have workers congress on the national level, plenty of people's assemblies on the provencial and city level. They also have consultative assemblies for business issues.

Citizens are very satisfied of their government, despite some of its excesses, unlike so called western democratic governments.

Their material condititons are as good as in Europe, at least for most folks.

Just because you do not directly elect the president of your government doesn't make you less democratic. Switzerland doesn't elect its government by universal suffrage, neither does the UK, or the EU. Their democratic model is just different.

But then we have different values than China, and we claim to have more freedom (whatever it means today).

The ban on tiktok didn't come when everyone was criticizing the negative impact it had on children and teenager's mental health, it only came now when lots of its users started publicly criticizing a certain country more openly than is allowed on other platforms... So its censorship/ban will be to comply with western censorship rules,thus making us no better than China in this regard.

People were discussing banning TikTok before Oct. 7th.

That isn’t when that conflict started, but it also isn’t when the push to ban TikTok started.

Yes I totally understand this point but the Trump administration was trying to get Bytedance to sell TikTok to Oracle before the war IIRC.

Really showing their hand with the NatSec claims in my opinion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/technology/trump-oracle-a...

The US isn't China, and our government is explicitly prohibited from attempting to censor or otherwise curate public media.

And yet it does.

Ever wondered how all those fancy action movies got their tanks just like that?

Cuz they had to beg the US gov for them; they are pretty much free to use under the condition that you do not critize the government's foreign policy or the army itself.

So if you want to make a war movie that is critical of the government, good luck.

And thats just one example; there is much more regarding all the "experts" send on television to talk about this or that country that happens to be at odd with the Washington dictatorship.

You missed the word 'explicitly'.

So the examples you're citing are all of the US government attempting to influence media through incentives and quid-pro-quo arrangements, i.e. exactly the same way every other organization in our society attempts to do so, precisely because it is not able to exercise any sort of direct political power over the media in the way that China does.

I'm sure this legislation will be almost immediately overturned by the courts. It has severe first amendment and fifth amendment problems, along with possibly being an illegal bill of attainder.

I guess I am looking at the issue on the level below media, primarily as a trade issue.

It’s not that TikTok can’t exist; they’ve been trying to force a sale AFAIK. Whether it’s a NatSec issue or a censorship issue seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

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