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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of US organizations decoupling stuff from China, especially if it's fairly peripheral, such as pulling back from running events there. But there's also a lot of more fundamental second-sourcing and the like.

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Well depends on the organizations. Some of the organizations aren't actually pulling away from China, as they're just getting outcompeted in terms of price/quality by local companies. To my understanding, government is trying to convince people that "Chinese products can also be luxury", and some people are switching.

Or it could be part of general trend of splitting off internet and creating a firewalled chinese internet. PRC is explicitly favoring this outcome for decades now with explicit incentives via legal, financial and social routes.

They already did that ages ago. Any web tech company that wants access to Chinese market needs to play ball with PRC (just like what Apple and Microsoft does). Average Chinese person really doesn't care about global web, and the ones that really do, figure a way out through VPNs. I'm not Chinese, so I might be totally wrong, but that is my perception of talking to expats or people who still in the country.

Organizations dealt with certain "weirdnesses" (the great Firewall) for a long time. But my sense is that over the past few years there's been an increasing sense of pulling back from all this.

It is going both ways. This is less about censorship and more about having a full local and independent supply chain. The two are going to war unless one of them collapses first or the US cedes Asia to China.

The writing has been on the wall for over a decade, at this point. The only companies that "risk it" with China are the ones that rely on borderline (or in some cases, literal) slave labor to maintain their margins. If you don't have an outstanding manufacturing investment to honor, it's a net-negative reliance in many cases.

Canva has a great presence in China.

Canva is Australian though.

Still foreign.

True, but Australia and China have extremely close economic relations due to proximity and an FTA.

That's a pretty one-way relationship though. Australia and China are literally thousands of miles away from each other, but China is still important to Australia because all the continental landmasses are far from Australia.

Well unlike most countries Australia and China have a lot of two-way trade (though imports to China are double exports) because China imports lots of raw minerals (as well as food) from them, and noone buys as many raw materials as China does. And thousands of km is still much less than twenty thousand to Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Or a simpler explanation, China owns most / lots of Aus companies, from raw material to farm lands.

For many things, it was never a particular net positive. At this point, it makes sense to cleanly and quietly withdraw. This particular release isn't especially quiet but many companies are just stopping doing activities at convenient points.

This is not remotely accurate. Plenty of large tech companies still play in China. The difficulties are very high but if you are big enough the huge market size it’s still very profitable. I don’t think google/etc are in China for its slave labor.

Certainly, depends on the company/organization. If working in China is a big win then many companies will decide to continue doing so while preparing other options. If it's more marginal, then starting to carefully pull out probably makes sense. Which is more or less what I'm seeing. I'm not sure about ten years but the situation over the last five has started to become pretty clear.

> Plenty of large tech companies still play in China

Depending on the segment you are in within the tech industry, the Chinese subsidiary of the foreign company might be a white-labelled Chinese offering (eg. AWS China, Azure China) or entirely unique IP developed in-house by the Chinese subsidiary.

AWS and Azure in China are the literal opposite of white labeling. It's still the global product, branded under the global name, (mostly) operated by the global organizations.

The affiliation with Chinese companies is borderline fine print, white labeling would be if you had "tencent cloud" which happened to behave exactly like Azure.

It's not just tech companies, many entertainment companies (e.g. video games, media) do the same, even at the risk of alienating or angering Western customers

I'll never buy a Blizzard product again. Fortunately they’ve made this very easy for me.

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