My problem is the unfair competition of Chinese app devs having access to Western markets when Western app devs don't have the same level of access to the Chinese market.
That said, there's a large difference between the US/Europe spying on each other, and a country like China, who (along with the US and Europe) has plans to go to war should they deem it necessary.
I will not be shocked if this generation is remembered as the biggest security leak in history.
The reason the West generally doesn't adopt policies like that is because we believe in letting people speak the truth to power and that generally gives us an advantage because we have more overall perspectives and are more likely to organise around the truth. It is challenging to suppress discussions about our own weaknesses and we are aware of where the major problem points are likely to be.
Mimicking China's policies restricting access to markets is probably a loss for us. We want asymmetry here, it gives us an advantage. Given that we seem to have/be giving up the industrial edge it is worth holding on to what we have left.
This, again, is a free speech issue. If your business truly have nothing to do with free speech (sorry, but iCloud and Microsoft 365 all had a free speech issue since they enable people to connect and publish), for example Amazon, no local partner is required. And Amazon has been there since forever.
Sometimes, even in a domain with free speech issue, you can have market access to China. For example, Steam is able to sell games in China since many years ago, even with their community page frequently blocked by GFW due to mostly unregulated user-generated content. They certainly can be cut-off: they rely on Alipay and WeChat Pay for payment. But this hasn't happened.
Oh, and Epic, GOG too.
> the capital requirements are incredibly high, corruption is through the roof, and when the local partner or the government rip you off, you absolutely will not have equal protection under the law.
While I indeed don't feel safe about the law protection. I wonder have you actually tried to setup a business in China? Or you are just repeating what you saw on Reddit?
https://english.shanghai.gov.cn/en-EstablishaCompany/2023120...
I’m not sure how you’d connect mining, energy, health care, transport, agriculture, or quite a few of those categories to free speech.
> While I indeed don't feel safe about the law protection. I wonder have you actually tried to setup a business in China?
Yes, I’ve been involved in a couple of WOFEs and quite a few JVs. I’ve worked on and off with companies doing business in China for the past 20 years or so. Access to legal protections has improved somewhat, but it’s been a (sometimes very serious) issue for many of the people I’ve worked with.
A lot of people criticize the state of Chinese academics as uncreative and fraudulent, and their industries as copycats, but there might cross a tipping point where China is clearly more innovative than the EU, even as the EU leads the world in democratically-minded regulations and civic rights.
There are many world democracies and autocracies. We absolutely should never expect that merely following some first principles of free markets and democracies should determine why some nations rank atop the world.
Have you ever talked to an average person
The reason the West doesn't adopt policies like this is that we run our own propaganda operations against our own citizens. Corporate advertising is an arm of this. The people and organizations with the most wealth and power can buy the biggest megaphones, and our system just lets those viewpoints get massively amplified. We don't need to suppress individual thought and speech, since it largely isn't competitive in the average American's mind.
I don't understand this argument. Are you OK with US companies or the NSA doing it? How does one group doing something bad justify not caring about another group doing it?
Not to mention, the US is an allied country whose interests overwhelmingly align with the interests of most of Europe. Conceptually, surveillance sucks - but if these are my only choices, I'd much rather have a dossier with the NSA than with their Chinese counterpart.
If you have two choices and both behave same on some principle, trying to have a principled stand is futile.
> I'd much rather have a dossier with the NSA than with their Chinese counterpart.
That's a naive view. For Italians, dossier with Giorgia Meloni or her friends can be far more dangerous than with Xi. By proximity and relevance, they are more likely to be vocal about/active in Italian politics. Also, Italian govt. has far more power to influence their lives than Chinese govt. has.
As an Indian, I'll be far more concerned about how much I am tracked by Modi/Indian police/agencies than the Chinese counterparts.
That seems insane given that China has been engaged in a proxy war against Europe (via Russia) for the past couple of years.
I don’t want to be spied on in general. No matter by whom.
If a foreign adversary directly controls the media your citizens consume, that is a pretty huge risk.
they use that information to manipulate you as much as they can
which is most people is a lot more then they think it is
like a _huge lot more_, humans are fundamentally quite manipulable
especially teens, the main target audience of TickTock
well they also can use the information to idk. know exactly when it's the best time to kitnap a kit of someone they want to blackmail, it's not that china hasn't done stuff like that more then just one or two times
What I don't understand is this hatred of Trump, he was the first one to consider China an enemy, I remember when he started with the tariffs, the whole democratic party went crazy. Trump has been right about many things that now are like normality.
I remember the first act of Biden was to stop a railroad strike and causing a environmental disaster the day after
Democrats (and I don't mean the party) should be worried about Trump and what comes with him.
I ALSO think the lack of reciprocal market access and the differences between TikTok (its equivalent) in China and the US version are concerning. It’s telling that children in China have caps on how much time they can spend in the app, but the US version doesn’t have any such thing.