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> Chinese policy seems to have not significantly changed in the last 5 years towards the US, but on the other hand US seemed ever more keen and eger to pursue a

> Chinese policy seems to have not significantly changed in the last 5 years towards the US, but on the other hand US seemed ever more keen and eger to pursue a hostile attitude towards China. For decades, China has blocked U.S. companies from fair competition, reneged on trade deals when it suits them, backed out of industrial partnerships after extracting the IP it deems useful, and generally been a bad trade partner. I agree that the president shouldn't have authority to arbitrarily block a product or company (and ultimately he doesn't, he'll need broader support among elected officials), but it's absurd to suggest that the U.S. should blindly accept hostile behavior for decades on end without reacting, or else itself be labeled "hostile."

dirtyid 6y ago
The ongoing deterrence hole when it comes to US-China relations in variety of domains has been acknowledged by China watchers consistently in the past 10 years. The issue is whether current admins' China-hawks tough on China approach is smart and good for long-term US interests or merely counterproductive electioneering / domestic distraction which is... characteristic of behavior when it comes to managing other foreign relations so far. Nvm US has been quietly undermining China with Asia pivot for 10 years - many people are consumed by Trump/Pompeo and previously Bolton/Banning grievance politics because publicly clapping back feels good. Same ppl have no problem recognizing US foreign policy everywhere has been catastrophic for US interests in the last 4 years, but go full smooth brain cheering leading mode because it's China. Like holy shit, it's Pompeo. Folks can pretend/hope broken clock is right twice a day or realize people with bad history of foreign policy is maybe just bad at foreign policy. These are individuals who have no problem shaping America into the enemy it wants to fight.
quotemstr 6y ago
The problem here isn't TikTok being banned. I couldn't care less about TikTok. The problem here is singling out an individual entity for punishment outside an established framework of laws just because we don't like it. You can be tough on China without becoming China. Nobody is suggesting that China's trade policy go unchallenged. What I do want is a policy including evidence, recourse, and the possibility of compliance. I have seen no explanation whatsoever of why TikTok is so urgently terrible that we can't deal with whatever it is that the company is doing using rules --- and this strange silence is coming from people ordinarily keen on that old "government of laws, not men" principle. Everything is weird these days.
- hhsuey 6y ago
  > You can be tough on China without becoming China. Honest question. Do you know how this could be done? I'm not too familiar with foreign affairs.
  - elSidCampeador 6y ago
    > You can be tough on China without becoming China. Sovereign nations have always reserved the right to decide what is allowed on their shores. That they disallow an entity from operating on their shores does not mean that they have "become China".
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      You are conflating rule of law and sovereignty.
      - benchen70 6y ago
        China can do whatever it wants, US can do whatever it wants. Whatever a country wants to do has nothing to do with how it governed, law or not. Law is a set of communally mutually agreed upon rules, so a society can function. However, the key is the word "communal", as in - which community is agreeing upon this law. China can complain that the new laws in the US is illegitimate, but the laws are made by Americans for Americans. Of course the law is not going to extend outside US, for example, they do not dictate what some Canadian company operating in Canada can do. But, in the US, these laws are there for Americans, for American soil, under the territory that the US government formally rules over. Of course, the US makes these rules, because it is its sovereign right to do so. China has no authority over how or why this law is made. Just like the US has no authority to say how Chinese government creates laws. But then again, China likes to say “Do not interfere in our internal matters”; the US can say the same thing.
      - elSidCampeador 6y ago
        The rule of law exists because of a country's sovereignty. Sometimes, the two must be conflated.
wildrhythms 6y ago
The rationale in your comment is unconvincing to me. If Tiktok is breaking the law, that should come to light and be actioned like any other company breaking the law; likewise TOS violations on respective app stores. I haven't seen any reports to suggest that Tiktok is breaking U.S. law, have you? And if the rationale is, as you suggested, a retaliation against 'bad behavior for decades', what precedent would banning Tiktok set for other non-U.S. owned apps and services?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ddevault 6y ago
  I haven't decided how I feel about the TikTok debate yet, but just to offer a better rationalization: foreign relations is the President's domain. Apps are one way that a country projects its soft power, and as such this might be applicable. If TikTok was not a foreign-owned app, I don't think that Trump would have a leg to stand on, but because it is, I'm not entirely certain he doesn't.
- albacur 6y ago
  My comment wasn't specific to TikTok, but rather OP's assertion that the U.S. is a hostile actor, whereas China is just being China. Regarding TikTok, foreign-owned companies must follow U.S. laws, which are subject to due process. Additionally, they must not pose an imminent threat to national security. For better or worse, the government tends to be tight-lipped about matters of national security and isn't compelled to divulge details to the public. Normally, this is acceptable because we trust our government to act responsibility and in our best interest. Is TikTok a legitimate threat to security? I don't know, and with Trump's tendency to make everything look like a publicity stunt, my trust in the government to use its power responsibly is not very high.
  - jewelry 6y ago
    Cannot believe the president has the power without legal battle to ban business activity. If it's national security, let out the cat. Otherwise how could people believe if this won't happen to SAP, Volkswagon, Sony next time.
hajile 6y ago
Look over the US bills for 2020. The only ones passing both Democrat House and Republican Senate are either coronavirus or China. The level of concern is so big that the Democrats basically did a rather public 180 on China during an important election year. As far as the company, the President seems fully allowed to place restrictions on companies as foreign policy. If you're talking about the "American" part, it is owned by foreign entities, so the case still seems pretty good. Chinese spying on US citizens on US soil is definitely a foreign policy issue. Obama's administration was known to walk up to companies with a rubber-stamped order to do whatever (usually spying on US citizens) and the place a gag order on the company so they couldn't even tell their users what was happening to them. If that was never challenged, I doubt this would be as preventing spying is certainly more moral than doing the spying.
billfruit 6y ago
Not just broader support among elected officials, but it needs to be in line with the constitution too. Even with full on bi-partisan majority and popular support, unconstitutional measures cannot be executed by the Federal Government.
- learc83 6y ago
  Well Congress can definitely ban foreign owned companies from operating in the US under at least 2 sections of the constitution that I can think of. And Congress has delegated part of that power to the President.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > Even with full on bi-partisan majority and popular support, unconstitutional measures cannot be executed by the Federal Government. And the fact that the US Constitution only allows the Federal Government to regulate interstate commerce is why Wickard v. Filburn was decided for Filburn. Growing wheat to feed your own pigs is obviously not interstate commerce so the Feds can’t tell you what to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn Obviously that’s not what actually happened. Equally obviously the constitution constrains the government exactly as much as it wishes to be constrained.
- albacur 6y ago
  The Constitution applies to independent foreign enterprises and state-owned enterprises that aren't under direct control of the state. The Constitution does not apply if a foreign government "exerts sufficient control over [the enterprise] to make it an agent of the State." I don't know if it can be argued that ByteDance falls in this category, but there have been many allegations that the company works closely with the CCP to provide surveillance and disseminate propaganda on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
cma 6y ago
Sounds exactly like how the US developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater Otherwise we would be trading beaver pelts and providing cheap labor. Trump is banning TikTok because a bunch of teens pranked his rally using the platform.
- apatters 6y ago
  It's exactly how South Korea and many other countries developed (and continue to develop) as well. The difference here is that China is positioning itself as a political rival to the United States. America is under no obligation to help its rivals develop. Prior to Xi Jinping's belligerent foreign poljcy America was considerably more welcoming to Chinese companies. You reap what you sow.
  - ptx 6y ago
    > America is under no obligation to help its rivals develop. Right. As long as we acknowledge that this is what's going on, so the rest of the world can feel free to just laugh at the US the next time they claim some grandiose moral high ground in their petty squabble to keep their rival down.
    - Mekantis 6y ago
      It's not just the US at risk here. I feel like nobody here pays attention to what China does. Look at all the tensions between China and... Literally nearly every country around them. This isn't a US-only problem.
      - cma 6y ago
        Central America, South America, and the Caribbean would like a word..
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
      You think liberal democracy (however imperfect) vs. aggressive totalitarianism is merely a "petty squabble?"
c3534l 6y ago
I'm sorry, but "we're merely acting as bad as the Chinese government here" does not seem like a very convincing argument.
- speleding 6y ago
  The US left the moral high ground some time ago. (About 4 years ago)
  - shigawire 6y ago
    Might be a bit longer ago than that.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    This line of thinking is absurd. Where are the US's death and labor camps? Global IP theft apparatus? Religious persecutions? Actual territorial expansion? Oh, but we have a leader that says mean things. Totally on par with China.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      > This line of thinking is absurd. It seems there is a kind of "conceptualization mode" that different people operate in when evaluating a scenario. If you consider this situation as a binary rather than a spectrum, then the respective behaviours do seem the same. Similarly, the same thing can even happen when two people are both looking from a spectrum-based perspective, but have differing levels of detail (number of included variables) in their spectrum. If something like this is indeed in play, then it's not surprising how two different people can come to diametrically opposed conclusions, yet both have extremely high certainty that their conclusion is objectively correct...because they are (or at least plausibly can be) both "right", from the specific perspective each person is operating in.
    - speleding 6y ago
      The reasoning you display here, "we're not as bad as China", is exactly what I meant with the "USA has left the moral high ground". There was a time when they aimed to lead by example.
Karishma1234 6y ago
> For decades, China has blocked U.S. companies from fair competition, reneged on trade deals when it suits them, backed out of industrial partnerships after extracting the IP it deems useful, and generally been a bad trade partner. I am not passing any value judgement here but USA has done exact same things to other countries from time to time when it suited them. I am not saying USA should not react to China's hostilities but USA must acknowledge that its traditional approach of arm twisting does not work anymore with China. There are several trade-offs USA needs to consider while banning Tiktok. The major one being of precedent and slippery slope. USA needs to either demonstrate some evidence of harm from Tiktok and ban it on national security grounds or be explicit that this is purely to hurt China and Tiktok is being targeted because it is a successful Chinese company.
Thorrez 6y ago
> but it's absurd to suggest that the U.S. should blindly accept hostile behavior for decades on end without reacting, or else itself be labeled "hostile." That's not absurd at all. Just because your enemy behaves badly doesn't make it acceptable for you to behave badly.
- albacur 6y ago
  It makes it acceptable to defend yourself. If you want claim the president shouldn't have sole authority to ban foreign companies or products, that's fair. And I don't know that he actually has that power, it could all be bluster. I mean, he also said he would make Mexico pay for a border wall.
- tguedes 6y ago
  This is geopolitics, not grade school.
dehrmann 6y ago
For all of the issues with Trump, he was right to point out the plight of post-manufacturing working class Americans, the rise of North Korea as a nuclear power, and problems with the US-China relationship. He just handled all these issues poorly. He really only helped the rust belt by getting a handful of token factories to not close. Nothing really came of his meeting with Kim, and tensions have even escalated slightly. On the China front, he started a trade war with China and worked on some technology bans (both questionably helpful), and at the same time withdrew from the TPP, started trade disputes with strong allies, and weakened NATO. Coordinated response and strong western alliances would have been far more effective, but he did neither.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  While I agree with you a little, we have to admit the failure of american and "developed" nations industries isn't just due to generosity from their parts towards China. China competed, made the sacrifices necessary to get it running at low cost and acceptable quality, and not us. Our factory workers can't compete at that price, can't bear the same struggle and can't do it on the scale of the chinese workers. We like to picture them as powerless ants in a crushing machine, but it's not so black and white for sure. Get the factories back and you lose competitiveness and it's higher level Chinese service companies who will start designing products and replacing americans. It's a trap, and it's already showing signs it's working. I love my Huawei phone and it got me used not to have a google account. Something I could not imagine a year ago.

dirtyid 6y ago

The ongoing deterrence hole when it comes to US-China relations in variety of domains has been acknowledged by China watchers consistently in the past 10 years. The issue is whether current admins' China-hawks tough on China approach is smart and good for long-term US interests or merely counterproductive electioneering / domestic distraction which is... characteristic of behavior when it comes to managing other foreign relations so far. Nvm US has been quietly undermining China with Asia pivot for 10 years - many people are consumed by Trump/Pompeo and previously Bolton/Banning grievance politics because publicly clapping back feels good. Same ppl have no problem recognizing US foreign policy everywhere has been catastrophic for US interests in the last 4 years, but go full smooth brain cheering leading mode because it's China. Like holy shit, it's Pompeo. Folks can pretend/hope broken clock is right twice a day or realize people with bad history of foreign policy is maybe just bad at foreign policy. These are individuals who have no problem shaping America into the enemy it wants to fight.

quotemstr 6y ago

The problem here isn't TikTok being banned. I couldn't care less about TikTok. The problem here is singling out an individual entity for punishment outside an established framework of laws just because we don't like it. You can be tough on China without becoming China. Nobody is suggesting that China's trade policy go unchallenged. What I do want is a policy including evidence, recourse, and the possibility of compliance. I have seen no explanation whatsoever of why TikTok is so urgently terrible that we can't deal with whatever it is that the company is doing using rules --- and this strange silence is coming from people ordinarily keen on that old "government of laws, not men" principle. Everything is weird these days.

hhsuey 6y ago
> You can be tough on China without becoming China. Honest question. Do you know how this could be done? I'm not too familiar with foreign affairs.
- elSidCampeador 6y ago
  > You can be tough on China without becoming China. Sovereign nations have always reserved the right to decide what is allowed on their shores. That they disallow an entity from operating on their shores does not mean that they have "become China".
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    You are conflating rule of law and sovereignty.
    - benchen70 6y ago
      China can do whatever it wants, US can do whatever it wants. Whatever a country wants to do has nothing to do with how it governed, law or not. Law is a set of communally mutually agreed upon rules, so a society can function. However, the key is the word "communal", as in - which community is agreeing upon this law. China can complain that the new laws in the US is illegitimate, but the laws are made by Americans for Americans. Of course the law is not going to extend outside US, for example, they do not dictate what some Canadian company operating in Canada can do. But, in the US, these laws are there for Americans, for American soil, under the territory that the US government formally rules over. Of course, the US makes these rules, because it is its sovereign right to do so. China has no authority over how or why this law is made. Just like the US has no authority to say how Chinese government creates laws. But then again, China likes to say “Do not interfere in our internal matters”; the US can say the same thing.
    - elSidCampeador 6y ago
      The rule of law exists because of a country's sovereignty. Sometimes, the two must be conflated.

wildrhythms 6y ago

The rationale in your comment is unconvincing to me. If Tiktok is breaking the law, that should come to light and be actioned like any other company breaking the law; likewise TOS violations on respective app stores. I haven't seen any reports to suggest that Tiktok is breaking U.S. law, have you? And if the rationale is, as you suggested, a retaliation against 'bad behavior for decades', what precedent would banning Tiktok set for other non-U.S. owned apps and services?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ddevault 6y ago
I haven't decided how I feel about the TikTok debate yet, but just to offer a better rationalization: foreign relations is the President's domain. Apps are one way that a country projects its soft power, and as such this might be applicable. If TikTok was not a foreign-owned app, I don't think that Trump would have a leg to stand on, but because it is, I'm not entirely certain he doesn't.
albacur 6y ago
My comment wasn't specific to TikTok, but rather OP's assertion that the U.S. is a hostile actor, whereas China is just being China. Regarding TikTok, foreign-owned companies must follow U.S. laws, which are subject to due process. Additionally, they must not pose an imminent threat to national security. For better or worse, the government tends to be tight-lipped about matters of national security and isn't compelled to divulge details to the public. Normally, this is acceptable because we trust our government to act responsibility and in our best interest. Is TikTok a legitimate threat to security? I don't know, and with Trump's tendency to make everything look like a publicity stunt, my trust in the government to use its power responsibly is not very high.
- jewelry 6y ago
  Cannot believe the president has the power without legal battle to ban business activity. If it's national security, let out the cat. Otherwise how could people believe if this won't happen to SAP, Volkswagon, Sony next time.

hajile 6y ago

Look over the US bills for 2020. The only ones passing both Democrat House and Republican Senate are either coronavirus or China. The level of concern is so big that the Democrats basically did a rather public 180 on China during an important election year. As far as the company, the President seems fully allowed to place restrictions on companies as foreign policy. If you're talking about the "American" part, it is owned by foreign entities, so the case still seems pretty good. Chinese spying on US citizens on US soil is definitely a foreign policy issue. Obama's administration was known to walk up to companies with a rubber-stamped order to do whatever (usually spying on US citizens) and the place a gag order on the company so they couldn't even tell their users what was happening to them. If that was never challenged, I doubt this would be as preventing spying is certainly more moral than doing the spying.

billfruit 6y ago

Not just broader support among elected officials, but it needs to be in line with the constitution too. Even with full on bi-partisan majority and popular support, unconstitutional measures cannot be executed by the Federal Government.

learc83 6y ago
Well Congress can definitely ban foreign owned companies from operating in the US under at least 2 sections of the constitution that I can think of. And Congress has delegated part of that power to the President.
barry-cotter 6y ago
> Even with full on bi-partisan majority and popular support, unconstitutional measures cannot be executed by the Federal Government. And the fact that the US Constitution only allows the Federal Government to regulate interstate commerce is why Wickard v. Filburn was decided for Filburn. Growing wheat to feed your own pigs is obviously not interstate commerce so the Feds can’t tell you what to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn Obviously that’s not what actually happened. Equally obviously the constitution constrains the government exactly as much as it wishes to be constrained.
albacur 6y ago
The Constitution applies to independent foreign enterprises and state-owned enterprises that aren't under direct control of the state. The Constitution does not apply if a foreign government "exerts sufficient control over [the enterprise] to make it an agent of the State." I don't know if it can be argued that ByteDance falls in this category, but there have been many allegations that the company works closely with the CCP to provide surveillance and disseminate propaganda on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

cma 6y ago

Sounds exactly like how the US developed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater Otherwise we would be trading beaver pelts and providing cheap labor. Trump is banning TikTok because a bunch of teens pranked his rally using the platform.

apatters 6y ago
It's exactly how South Korea and many other countries developed (and continue to develop) as well. The difference here is that China is positioning itself as a political rival to the United States. America is under no obligation to help its rivals develop. Prior to Xi Jinping's belligerent foreign poljcy America was considerably more welcoming to Chinese companies. You reap what you sow.
- ptx 6y ago
  > America is under no obligation to help its rivals develop. Right. As long as we acknowledge that this is what's going on, so the rest of the world can feel free to just laugh at the US the next time they claim some grandiose moral high ground in their petty squabble to keep their rival down.
  - Mekantis 6y ago
    It's not just the US at risk here. I feel like nobody here pays attention to what China does. Look at all the tensions between China and... Literally nearly every country around them. This isn't a US-only problem.
    - cma 6y ago
      Central America, South America, and the Caribbean would like a word..
  - boring_twenties 6y ago
    You think liberal democracy (however imperfect) vs. aggressive totalitarianism is merely a "petty squabble?"

c3534l 6y ago

I'm sorry, but "we're merely acting as bad as the Chinese government here" does not seem like a very convincing argument.

speleding 6y ago
The US left the moral high ground some time ago. (About 4 years ago)
- shigawire 6y ago
  Might be a bit longer ago than that.
- Alupis 6y ago
  This line of thinking is absurd. Where are the US's death and labor camps? Global IP theft apparatus? Religious persecutions? Actual territorial expansion? Oh, but we have a leader that says mean things. Totally on par with China.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > This line of thinking is absurd. It seems there is a kind of "conceptualization mode" that different people operate in when evaluating a scenario. If you consider this situation as a binary rather than a spectrum, then the respective behaviours do seem the same. Similarly, the same thing can even happen when two people are both looking from a spectrum-based perspective, but have differing levels of detail (number of included variables) in their spectrum. If something like this is indeed in play, then it's not surprising how two different people can come to diametrically opposed conclusions, yet both have extremely high certainty that their conclusion is objectively correct...because they are (or at least plausibly can be) both "right", from the specific perspective each person is operating in.
  - speleding 6y ago
    The reasoning you display here, "we're not as bad as China", is exactly what I meant with the "USA has left the moral high ground". There was a time when they aimed to lead by example.

Karishma1234 6y ago

> For decades, China has blocked U.S. companies from fair competition, reneged on trade deals when it suits them, backed out of industrial partnerships after extracting the IP it deems useful, and generally been a bad trade partner. I am not passing any value judgement here but USA has done exact same things to other countries from time to time when it suited them. I am not saying USA should not react to China's hostilities but USA must acknowledge that its traditional approach of arm twisting does not work anymore with China. There are several trade-offs USA needs to consider while banning Tiktok. The major one being of precedent and slippery slope. USA needs to either demonstrate some evidence of harm from Tiktok and ban it on national security grounds or be explicit that this is purely to hurt China and Tiktok is being targeted because it is a successful Chinese company.

Thorrez 6y ago

> but it's absurd to suggest that the U.S. should blindly accept hostile behavior for decades on end without reacting, or else itself be labeled "hostile." That's not absurd at all. Just because your enemy behaves badly doesn't make it acceptable for you to behave badly.

albacur 6y ago
It makes it acceptable to defend yourself. If you want claim the president shouldn't have sole authority to ban foreign companies or products, that's fair. And I don't know that he actually has that power, it could all be bluster. I mean, he also said he would make Mexico pay for a border wall.
tguedes 6y ago
This is geopolitics, not grade school.

dehrmann 6y ago

For all of the issues with Trump, he was right to point out the plight of post-manufacturing working class Americans, the rise of North Korea as a nuclear power, and problems with the US-China relationship. He just handled all these issues poorly. He really only helped the rust belt by getting a handful of token factories to not close. Nothing really came of his meeting with Kim, and tensions have even escalated slightly. On the China front, he started a trade war with China and worked on some technology bans (both questionably helpful), and at the same time withdrew from the TPP, started trade disputes with strong allies, and weakened NATO. Coordinated response and strong western alliances would have been far more effective, but he did neither.

xwolfi 6y ago
While I agree with you a little, we have to admit the failure of american and "developed" nations industries isn't just due to generosity from their parts towards China. China competed, made the sacrifices necessary to get it running at low cost and acceptable quality, and not us. Our factory workers can't compete at that price, can't bear the same struggle and can't do it on the scale of the chinese workers. We like to picture them as powerless ants in a crushing machine, but it's not so black and white for sure. Get the factories back and you lose competitiveness and it's higher level Chinese service companies who will start designing products and replacing americans. It's a trap, and it's already showing signs it's working. I love my Huawei phone and it got me used not to have a google account. Something I could not imagine a year ago.