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Comment by biophysboy | Hacker News Reader

I think one of my biggest frustrations with tech right now is how credulous they are with regard to China vs USA arguments. I see it on HN regularly.

I am not saying the China shock was fake, or state surveillance is fine, or that they don’t exploit migrant workers, or that their currency manipulation and financial repression were/are good. I just think we should be skeptical that national security arguments are motivated by virtue, especially when “the good” is largely confined to what’s good for USA tech

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Regardless of where you stand on American politics, it is just plain bad for all Americans for China to advance its geopolitical ambitions.

This is not a left versus right thing. China being unchallenged in the world will spell a quality of life decrease for us in the West. They are not “the good guys.” You’re free to see both parties as ‘neutral’ in alignment, but you still don’t want to have to be the losing party when they come into conflict. My point is China is not going to be sharing any of what they gain with Americans, even the ones who cheer for them - it’ll in fact be coming at your expense.

The CPC having a direct feed into the brains of every Gen Z and younger American is trivially easy to exploit - and there is a 0% chance that they won’t do so next year when they will likely invade Taiwan. If China is in control of TikTok, they’ll boost a ton of propaganda, supposedly people “from Taiwan” who greet the PLA as liberators, explaining how Taiwan being independent is actually oppression, and how they’ve always considered themselves part of the PRC, only evil politicians were keeping them apart. And they’ll make sure to suppress all media that exposes the violence on the ground. Finally, they’ll boost content urging Americans to protest US involvement and to sabotage the military, such as by chaining themselves to ships, etc.

Ryan McBeth has made a ton of videos laying out how this will work, and he does a better job than I have of explaining this.

TikTok is a cyberweapon.

I'd buy these arguments if America was a place that cared about its citizens and not a country that lets a small group of very elite, very rich, people ruin the lives of tens of millions of Americans subjecting them to poverty to make a buck.

The last war China was involved with was 1979 compared to America, today mind you, that is on the cusp of invading Venezuela because Rubio has a moronic axe to grind.

It's really hard to not see the facade for what it is: rich people are upset that their world order is collapsing.

Frankly who care? Give me universal medicare, universal childcare, and public higher education then maybe, just maybe, I might start to care about all this stuff that only seems to make people lives worse not better.

China has used resources to buy alliances with developing countries, like pretty much all of Africa, which they leveraged at the UN to have the communist party recognized.

Sadly you have to start caring for things to get better first.

America has used this same time period to sell out jobs to the lowest bidder, decimate its manufacturing industry to make a quick buck, is willing to sell "critical" tech to "enemies" to make a buck, make billions off of profiting from people's misery.

Why am I suppose to care that people in Africa are pushing for better worker rights and decolonialization? Because the executives as Nestle might make slightly lower money? That big tech can't extract more blood minerals? Boo hoo, it's not like this has ever benefited American citizens writ large.

Also the UN is worthless, if this is suppose to scare people you might lose your hat come election night in 2026.

The companies sold out the jobs, not our government, but it hasn’t done much but make us keep blaming the poor or “colored” folks.

We used to do that too until they decided USAID should be ended.

And I’ll take recognizing a communist party over dropping napalm on em.

That will only work as long as the check clears. Anyone relying on those 'friends' better hope China never stops sending those checks. Ask the US or the USSR how that goes.

Well, sure, but like our ports and other infra that they bought up, that's what they are doing everywhere, so the checks can stop, and they retain ownership of all the economic bottlenecks

No, if things get bad enough, locals have a way of terrorizing any stable uses of those infrastructure. Again ask the US and USSR. What the hell are the Chinese going to do, perform a Gaza on the locals?

Who is currently losing their shit over reduced supply of magnets? imagine if anything gets actually cutoff

Not the poor countries that China supposedly "owns". Countries like Pakistan can't even keep the lights on. Why would they care about rare earth magnets? China provides gifts and in exchange Pakistan provides a pinky promise that will disappear as soon as the checks stop. They can't control their borders much less their crazies. And those crazies will terrorize any Chinese that try to start shit and will make it impossible to reliably take advantage of any infrastructure that China may want to use.

I guess my first question is: why would taking control of TikTok prevent bad faith state actors? X, for example, has a lot of issues with foreign accounts spreading propaganda. It seems more like a “moderation at scale” issue to me.

It also of ingores the cases where state actors' and some wing of domestic politics have aligned interests (USSR & Communist parties in the early o mid 20th century, or Russia sponsoring/infiltrating rightwing countries in Western Europe & America in the 21st century)

X and Meta do try to uncover and scrub malicious state actors, like the investigation of the 2016 Russia misinformation campaign. Maybe, they could have done more, but there is no reason why they wouldn't put an earnest effort as they have nothing to gain from faking compliance. A social media platform owned by a foreign adversary does have this incentive.

X of today is, quite obviously, not the same thing as the X of 2016.

Can't be taken seriously if you're going to elide that "detail".

X may be owned by a crazy Elon, but that doesn't change that X today still has no incentive to allow for malicious state actors, especially under government pressure. In fact, they recently exposed that a lot of extremist political accounts were based out of foreign countries.

Do you not understand social media's business model?

The platform’s direct financial incentives are almost identical to malicious state actors’: to foment extreme engagement. It is not a secret to anyone that people engage most actively with outrage.

Content moderation costs money directly, then costs engagement indirectly.

I’m genuinely confused by your comment.

Maybe it seems identical because China doesn't have any grand short term ambitions, but financial incentive is fundamentally very different. Meta may screw over the American people, but America losing it's superpower status would only hurt them.

I can't parse your first sentence or what the relevance is to the discussion.

You said X has no incentive to allow foreign influence ops. Very clearly, not only do they have an incentive to allow them, but they have an additional disincentive to disallowing them (cost).

The fact those aligned incentives originate from different ultimate goals is totally irrelevant for as long as the two are aligned.

Foreign ops makes up a fraction of percent of X's revenue, if that. Any profit they gained from it cancels out with a similar degree of negative attention from the government, so overall they're incentivized to follow the direction of three letter agencies. A less inflammatory algorithm would maybe cost X a couple percent in revenue. If the government really wants to, they could pressure X to change their algorithm as they can easily cause much more pain to X than a couple percent of revenue.

A Chinese owned TikTok simply doesn't follow the same calculus. If the CEO of Bytedance (note different from the CEO of TikTok) gets a order flood the platform with anti-Taiwanese propaganda right before China invades Taiwan, the CEO would have to follow through even if it causes the value of TikTok to zero. The ban was not about how much harm TikTok has done already, it's about how much harm they can do in a worst case scenario.

Uhhh... you seem to imply that TikTok and X operate under different rules, while actually making the argument that they're the same ("if the govt really wanted to, they could successfully pressure X contrary to X's economic incentives")

Beyond that, you're just asserting a bunch of assumptions as if they're fact.

And all of this is irrelevant. I never argued TikTok/X/Meta are the same. The issue I raised is you positioning 2016 enforcement action as evidence of X's current enforcement posture and then suggesting there is some compliance motivation here (there isn't – there's no relevant law to comply with as far as USG is concerned) and suggesting there's no incentive to allow foreign ops (there is, as demonstrated).

Musk is the malicious state actor.

X is basically a propaganda arm for Israel at this point. It’s obviously under control of a nefarious state actor.

Which is odd considering how much of X is owned by the Saudis.

they have money and power to gain by faking that compliance, to the extent that if the foreign power gets what they want, meta or twitter gets what they want to, eg. removal of regulation or a ban on regulation of their AI products

> X and Meta do try to uncover and scrub malicious state actors

Like this US one?

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

> This is not a left versus right thing. China being unchallenged in the world will spell a quality of life decrease for us in the West.

America's incompetent leadership is self-inflicted. Biden's 2020 campaign strategy was pro status quo ante - which I find similar to your appeal to "normalcy". Unfortunately (for future American global primacy), this message did not resonate with voters in 2024. I suspect "getting back to normal" is not enough for Gens Y & Z, who have already lost a class war whose existence they may not be aware of.

Young people have legitimate gripes w/ housing and higher education. I would not describe this as having “lost a class war”.

I would describe the over-fiscalization of housing and education loans designed to increase profits for shareholders as different fronts in the same class war that young people have already lost.

The language of class war precludes any sort of repair of the situation. I see a ton of young people at work outside of my group within the org who should be getting paid better. When we're in management we have a responsibility to try to argue for narratives that lead to that outcome. And when we vote we need to remember that things that look bad for us homeowners like allowing big development companies to come in and raze all of our houses and build townhomes and apartments for rent might be necessary to keep the bad situation from getting worse. I think in the end what will save us is the big demographic crunch that's going to happen in the next 15 years, because there will be a lot of housing stock suddenly on the market with no buyers. We're all going to get an opportunity then to fix a lot of these problems. Or, if we do nothing and let the status quo reign, our kids will suddenly find themselves renting everything they use for the rest of their lives.

I think unless we acknowledge the class war, there is no way of winning it.

Big Capital is not my friend and its not most peoples friend, even if some of us here were lucky enough to be useful to them for now.

I'm not talking about the war with Capital, I'm talking about the war between the middle and lower classes.

> When we're in management we have a responsibility to try to argue for narratives that lead to that outcome.

My previous bosses would move to fire me or get me transferred out of their org if they found out I valued getting my employees paid more, over literally anything else that moved the bottom line.

> And when we vote we need to remember that things that look bad for us homeowners like allowing big development companies to come in and raze all of our houses and build townhomes and apartments for rent might be necessary to keep the bad situation from getting worse.

This has been explained for years. At best the reaction gotten from homeowners can be paraphrased to, “yea, I hope you keep the commons working, but I got my bag”

> Or, if we do nothing and let the status quo reign, our kids will suddenly find themselves renting everything they use for the rest of their lives.

There’s other options too after the ballot box stops working and your life is permanently worse under the status quo, but you are not allowed to discuss those options on Western social media sites

Violent revolution isn’t a solution though. We have almost a whole continent (Africa) as a case study for what happens when people finally get fed up with corrupt, incompetent governments and stage coups. The scariest warlord takes charge for a while and (often with a lot of additional bloodshed) chooses different winners and losers, until the cycle repeats.

Sheltered Gen-Z Americans, who have never known a disordered society love to talk about revolution, but they are so ill prepared for something like that. It’s not even funny. To be clear, none of us in the “first world” are prepared for something like that.

Looking at the FDR years it came to the elites almost losing everything for them to finally dole out a few crumbs. We are in uncharted territory though. If AGI comes to fruition assuming it does not run the numbers and just emigrate to China it will lead to a world where most people are not needed for GDP growth anymore. How is that society going to self-correct itself?

The German social safety net was introduced by Bismarck, a conservative.

You know why he did it? Credible threat of violent revolution.

That's what it takes.

I just want to be clear before we continue the discussion, so that you do not claim that I am trying to get a "gotcha" moment on you.

When we are discussing the United States of America, the nation founded on one of the most famously successful violent revolutions, to the point that we teach our children to celebrate it every year, your claim is that violent revolutions can not be a solution?

> there will be a lot of housing stock suddenly on the market with no buyers.

The only way some millennials will own house is by inheriting them from boomers, and the rest of the housing stock will be mostly bought by corporate investors. Everyone else will rent until death, and provide reccuring income to make the graph go up.

Still, it's like being on a plane and you're unhappy with the destination so you vote for a new pilot who has promised to immediately crash the plane into the ground.

>it is just plain bad for all Americans for China to advance its geopolitical ambitions.

In Gen Z's eyes, America is bad for Americans. That's what happens when you build a low trust society. America spent decades trying to build up a strong rapport among citizens and they tore it down and sold them out in a single generation.

Maybe china will be worse. But the appeals to nationalism simply will not work among our youth. We abandoned them, they will see the village burned to feel its warmth. Already happened in 2024.

Recognizing that our tech leaders are attempting to march us into a sort of technological feudalism is not an inherently gen Z take.

I don’t think this is exclusively a Gen Z thing. I’m Gen X and could not agree more with this assessment.

Yes, this was a good 30 years in the making, so anyone still in a career will feel it. Even some younger boomers would feel the after effects of tbis, especially those who didn't get to own a house.

Gen Z is simply unique as the "full immersion" generation. It's uniquely hard to ignore the youth unemployment for kids who are spending more than ever to be educated, or being hard locked out of minimum wage jobs our parents would scare us with because they lack a bachelor's degree.

I certainly don't envy young people entering the job market rn. But China's youth unemployment rate is far higher than America's. To come away from this thinking American capitalism is bad and "communism" (which doesn't really exist anymore on a large scale) would be better would be pretty misguided.

CS new grads today have the highest # of interesting potential startups to join than ever before

Not according to...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcollins/2025/12/15/compu...

or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291504

Your statement might be correct, but the dust has yet to settle for us to be able to determine that.

America did not build a low trust society though. Just the opposite.

The issue is that trust was intentionally sabotaged.

Does it really matter? The result is the same regardless of how it came about.

If they think capitalism is bad for Americans, they’d really dislike being part of some failed state version of the country. Again, China isn’t going to come redistribute all the billionaires’ wealth to the poor American zoomers. They don’t give a fk what happens to any Americans. They barely care about their own commoners. They represent the Party’s interests exclusively. Whatever enhances their power. Ideally if they can screw the US billionaires they will, but with the wealth all going to China.

Replace China with Trump you have the talking points of 2024. Still took a year of rampant incompetence and corruption to convince Gen Z otherwise.

China's soft rule will not be as incompetent.

Here are the scenarios that are playing out

1. China overtakes the US -> US society directly decines and thats it. (Your scenario)

2. China overtakes the US -> It takes out the elites with everyone else (what Gen-Z likely wants to see)

3. US manages to hold on -> Elites continue their trajectory of snapping everything up leaving the crumbs for everyone else. (The best case scenario pro-US people can hope for right now)

4. US manages to hold on -> They somehow decide to reform and implement v2.0 of New Deal. (The dream of the bernie sanders wing ie. a pipedream at this point)

You are really showing your age with your attitude.

Put yourself in Gen-Z's shoes. What is realistic at this point? What can even millenials hope for?

The best case is that they end up being a transitional generation that helps their kids survive their childhood and grow into a decent adult life. The worse case is managed decline.

Either way Gen Y and Gen Z are done for. This amazing American system you defend has ruined these generations long term outlooks and Trump's bumbling has already written their final chapters.

The main difference is that at least the CCP is economically competent. Our current republican overlords are also fucking us over and they're economically dumb as rocks.

They certainly cause economic damage with their stupid and/or corrupt takes on tariffs, mainly. But the other party wants to elect clowns like Mamdani who would crash everything.

You're being partly branwashed by american rich media. It's not about disliking capitalism. It's crony billionaires running the country and destroying it.

China has pulled many poor people or of poverty. Generations. You don't see this in media. You're comment is just misinformed and wrong.

A country building out its export industry means more people get jobs and out of poverty. Chinese leaders didn't do it for the benefit of their people. They only do anything in order to stay in power inside of the party so they can be rich. That's how the Chinese political system works. Please stop it with the Chinese leaders are benevolent narrative. It's clearly bunk.

You speak as if you know this to be true. What’s your evidence? Vibes? Be honest

Not everyone here is American.

From a European standpoint: The ideal outcome is a stalemate between China and the US, with us as the kingmaker.

We could basically do the same thing as Yugoslavia did during the Cold War and play both sides against one another, extracting concessions from both.

Every country wants to be in that position.

Y'all've got a lot of headwinds, and America should be helping you with them instead of posturing and pretending to be friends with our enemies.

America needs to get closer to Europe and India, democratic East Asia, Mexico, Vietnam ... not this bullshit we're doing right now.

> Every country wants to be in that position.

I agree. But not many are one of the largest economies in the world and the world's most prolific regulator.

> America should be helping you with them instead of posturing and pretending to be friends with our enemies.

I also agree, but unfortunately the American electorate and its elites have proven deeply untrustworthy. I wish it wasn't so, but that's what happened.

With that in mind, the best outcome for us is to hope for American power to decrease relative to China to increase our own leverage.

That only works in a world where Europe can replace all of the US forces in NATO. I'd like to see that, but it's gonna take a long while and a big commitment, so I'm sceptical.

> it is just plain bad for all Americans for China to advance its geopolitical ambitions

And what says has China on the advances of Americans geopolitical ambitions? I’m not saying they are the good guys obviously, but at this point as an European between China maybe invading Taiwan and the US openly threatening to take control of allied territory (Greenland) or on the verge of starting another war for oil control (Venezuela), I’m not sure what’s worst for "the west". And that’s not even talking about climate change, science, etc. Who is more aligned with a sustainable future for the world?

> TikTok is a cyberweapon

I’m far more concerned by the YouTube, Twitter/X and Facebook cyber weapons that have been radicalizing and destroying our societies for more than a decade. Just the other day a fake video about a coup in France trended on Facebook and not even our President could have it removed. Have you also see the plan of the US to weaken the EU by targeting countries to make them leave the EU? Again not saying China are good guys, but it’s time Americans freaking out about China have a hard look in the mirror.

As an Australian, this is broadly my take too. People may have explicable concerns about TikTok but at least China can’t systematically deny a foreign citizen access to digital society entirely as the US has done to Nicolas Guillou. If young people are open to anti-American propaganda it’s only because America has created that opportunity.

Its harder and harder to see US from outside (aka 95% of the world) as force of any good, apart from some amount of self-serving. So what you claim is largely invalid, like it or not. Maybe it will change in 3 years, but nobody is holding their breath.

Its just another side, with its own motivation, these days backstabbing and insulting those few friends that stubbornly still linger around for historical reasons, changing opinions frequently. Unreliable as are its sophisticated warfare products. Morals what?

America this america that, it's called US! You are US citizens! What's good for America? for the US to stop forcing every other country in America to add tariffs for any product coming from China

I'm tired of this "China is exploiting Gen Z", the US is a propaganda machine and has been for decades. Now they are mad that China is taking their space.

In what way will China "being unchallenged" result in a QOL decrease for us in the West? You didn't actually say why that is.

Because they're official plan is to be entirely self sufficient and export to everyone. This will decimate the remaining industry in the West.

> or state surveillance is fine, or that they don’t exploit migrant workers, or that their currency manipulation and financial repression were/are good.

can you clarify if you’re talking about China or the US?

Heh, good point. I would say the internal migration of Chinese Foxconn workers is a bit different from our situation. But there are parallels

Have you seen what ICE is up to?

Yes it is extremely evil. I was just saying domestic migration is a different thing than cross border migration. Different kind of exploitation, different kind of scapegoating

I don’t know. In a way I don’t think it matters if China are currently actively engaged in altering the opinions of Americans, what matters is whether they can. And an unknowable algorithm absolutely gives them the power to.

IMO the bigger problem is that national security is only part of the problem. An unknowable algorithm controlled by the Ellisons is not necessarily less dangerous than one controlled by China, the motivations are just different.

Yes, and the counterfactual scenario (Ellison or anyone else) does not even preclude foreign manipulation. Other platforms demonstrate this daily

Yes. Equally/more likely that Instagram/YouTube are embarrassed and mad at how swiftly TikTok came in and made a much better and more popular product.

They built upon a French product, every change in the French product was adopted by a copycat (app by tiktok creator).

Every attempt to ban the copycat app on Google store by the French was useless, since a new copycat app would pop up the next second.

So it's not like tiktok is some new innovation. What they did is still amazing, but malevolent, but credit where credit is due.

Wow, I'd never heard this. What French product?

The french product was called Mindie, the start of endless short videos with music, the reels, and the copycat was chinese musical.ly (later bought up by Bytedance).

Mindie failed because they got attacked by copyright claims by the big US tech, which obviously the chinese copycat was immune to, since China.

Interesting. I wonder if any of the Musical.ly creators ever saw Mindie.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/16/from-a-failing-product-to-...

This sounds like revisionist history.

Regardless of country, citizenship, "national security" arguments are always bad faith if pushed by the relevant "nation state"

Make no mistake this isn't about protecting US citizens, it's about consolidating power around conservative billionaires. It's not just limited to Tech. The Ellison family are media moguls. The Ellisons just want to gain more power, whether we're talking money or the ability to manufacture consent. They bought this opportunity from Trump: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2025/09/oracle-invested-mil...

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