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China doesn’t allow many western companies to operate in China. Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US?? This is an outrage that we sho

by cwhiz 6y ago

China doesn’t allow many western companies to operate in China. Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US?? This is an outrage that we should not allow. They steal our intellectual property, create state funded companies that are given monopoly access to their markets, and then unleash their stolen products on the world market. And if American or other western companies try to compete on the ground in China, they can’t. Would WeChat or TikTok exist if western chat and social media apps were given total access to Chinese markets??? Extreme doubt. The eventual end result of bending over to China is a world where all of the goods, services, and software are owned by China. This imbalance that China has created is unworkable and cannot be allowed to continue.

bradleybuda 6y ago
Because allowing Chinese companies to operate in the US is good for American consumers. This isn’t a zero-sum game.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  This short sighted policy is what has led to the slow decay of the American middle class.
  - vkou 6y ago
    No, the policy that lead to the decay of the American middle class is not China's rules on foreign investment. The policy that lead to that is American companies embracing globalism, which is, by the way, an American neo-liberal ideology.
    - cwhiz 6y ago
      You can embrace globalism without damaging your economy. You just have to choose to only deal with countries that play fairly. China does not play fairly and, as such, we should not do business with them.
      - marsrover 6y ago
        I'm not in agreement or disagreement but I'm genuinely curious how you can embrace globalism without damaging your economy? I have found myself leaning more towards neo-liberalism in some aspects but I don't know how this piece fits in.
        yahnu 6y ago
        USA has embraced globalism and benefitting from it. American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders. "The recent stability in the share of adults living in middle-income households marks a shift from a decades-long downward trend. From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points. But that shift was not all down the economic ladder. Indeed, the increase in the share of adults who are upper income was greater than the increase in the share who are lower income over that period, a sign of economic progress overall." https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
        njarboe 6y ago
        "American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders." As your quote says, it's not the wealth that has moved per say, but that people have moved upward out of the middle class and brought that wealth with them with more people moving up than moving down.
        yahnu 6y ago
        Right. I see how my wording can be wrong. I saw some comments (in this thread and some others) that seems to be of the opinion that USA has not benefitted by embracing globalization. That opinion is in contrast to what I have seen in data analysis/reports. So I wanted to say that maybe problem is not that USA hasn't benefitted from globalization but rather that benefit hasn't been distributed appropriately. I'm not from USA and my knowledge comes by reading about news reports and expert data analysis so I might be missing something.
    - 13415 6y ago
      Globalism is and always was inevitable and has in fact started already 200 years ago. It's also not a problem. A problem is how countries deal with the middle class and how they transform their society when there are shifts in production. For example, it's not China's fault that the average salary of a US CEO was 361 times higher than that of a factory worker in 2018, as opposed to only having been 20 times higher in the 1950s. What we see right now is really just the emergence of China as an economic super-power, thanks to their gigantic internal market and their technological advances. This was predicted for the past 40 years or so and it nothing to do with the problems that the US is facing. These problems are mostly internal.
      - novaRom 6y ago
        China is basically: low start + motivation + good education + low costs + state level protectionism + long term planning
- AbrahamParangi 6y ago
  Consider every concern about facebook having too much power on things like elections. Now imagine if facebook were controlled by an adversarial authoritarian regime.
  - zolosa 6y ago
    Or looking at the PRISM program it's better to ban Facebook and it's children companies rather than imagining .
    - AbrahamParangi 6y ago
      It would not be at all unreasonable for other countries to ban US social media companies.
- sidlls 6y ago
  How is it good for American consumers? Their privacy is further eroded in service of a violently oppressive totalitarian state. Also, the companies these Chinese companies compete against do not have equal access to Chinese markets, providing a significant advantage to Chinese companies: the supposed benefit to the consumer (reduced prices due to competition) erodes quickly in such an environment.
  - Cookingboy 6y ago
    > Also, the companies these Chinese companies compete against do not have equal access to Chinese markets That's just not true. All American tech companies can operate in China if they follow local laws, that's why Skype and iMessage are popular in China. Chinese companies have to follow the same local laws as well. Google/Facebook, etc voluntarily pulled out of the Chinese market because they don't want to follow China's draconian tech laws.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      Those laws require Chinese companies to have ownership stakes, sometimes majority ownership stakes, if not explicitly then effectively. That isn't "equal access".
      - Cookingboy 6y ago
        Again, complete lies. Ownership requirement is only for joint ventures. Both Apple and Microsoft operate in China in full capacity and neither companies are majority owned by the Chinese lol.
        sidlls 6y ago
        You're quibbling over technicalities. For most tech companies, operating in China requires a substantial relationship with Chinese owned business entities and partners, often tacitly, if not explicitly written by law, also requiring some shareholding or officer/executive relationship to manage the tangled web of CCP corruption.
- alexryan 6y ago
  The CCP has a saying. Win-win means we win twice.
alluro2 6y ago
When you say "steal" and "imbalance that China has created" - you expect to move almost all design, planning and manufacturing to China gradually over decades of time, give them all the technology because they are just "low-level workers", embrace what they build themselves because it's cheaper and good enough, and for them to be happy, in perpetuum, to receive a fraction of the profits? This situation was not created by China - it's just completely expected consequences of decades of un-strategical behavior which is now starting to bite back.
- will4274 6y ago
  I find your comment to be in bad faith. You failed to address Chinese bans of American companies, which was the thrust of parent's comment, and which is obviously the unfair imbalance China created. Quoting imbalance but ignoring the example is bad faith.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    Very few American companies are banned from China. The parent's comment is based on false premises about the economic relationship between the US and China.
    - notSupplied 6y ago
      Yes, China very selectively bans American companies, just as the US is now very selectively banning the same types of companies. It’s just Mercantilism: be open in all ways except the key industries you wish to develop domestically. I don’t think mercantilism is fundamentally evil (it’s how Japan and South Korea became wealthy first world nations at certain American industries expense) but don’t cry when your trade partners bite back.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  It's quite amazing how many people believe that a poor country like the China of the 1990s and early 2000s could manage to hoodwink the Western world into accepting an imbalanced relationship favoring China. The fact is that Western companies benefitted massively from China's opening-up, and that China was forced to undergo many painful reforms in order to join the WTO. An entire generation of Chinese workers lost their social safety network as a result of the breaking up of the state-run sector. The joint venture and IP transfer requirements, which have been rolled back over time, were a small price to pay in exchange for accessing a massive pool of cheap labor and a rapidly growing consumer market.
jdietrich 6y ago
>Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US? The US gains very substantial economic benefits from being an attractive place for international companies to do business. Foreign investors know that when they invest in America, they're getting a stable regulatory environment and a reasonably trustworthy civil legal system. If America decides to undermine that trust for short-term gain, there will be a substantial long-term cost. You might believe that hostile trade policies prevent American companies from competing in the Chinese market, but that's starkly contradicted by the number of American companies for whom China is a key market. Apple earn $11bn a year in China. Wal-Mart have thousands of stores there. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) have 40% of the Chinese fast food market and make more revenue there than anywhere else. Starbucks have 70% of the Chinese coffee market. The shelves of Chinese convenience stores are groaning with American-owned brands. An all-out trade war with China might be appealing, but be under no illusions that it'll be all upside for America. If China want to put the hurt on America, they have more levers to pull and more staying power. It's definitely not a fight you want to lose, but it might not even be a fight worth winning. China aren't thinking about next quarter or next year, they're thinking about the next generation. Where does the US see itself in 2050?
- godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
  I highly doubt China has more levers then the US when it comes to a trade war. China can't feed itself past subsistence level without imports. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/ China runs on oil just like every other modern economy, and they have pitiful amounts locally. They are the largest importer in the world and they absolutely need it to keep flowing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/10/17/china-is-the-worlds-largest-oil--gas-importer/#687831345441 https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/10/17/china-i... The US can feed itself domestically, and we can supply our own energy domestically. All we have to do is no longer put merchants heading toward China under the US navies protection and the CCP will be in serious trouble very quickly. Note - I'm not even saying we have to attack them, we just stop responding to any requests for help from them and let the world know. China relies on the US enforced world order to survive in its current form. The US relies on China for convenience, not for survival. Would it be wise to do what I just said? I don't know, and I'm not advocating for it, I just find it funny when people say China would so obviously win a trade war when they are definitely in the worse position at a fundamental level.
baddox 6y ago
I don’t follow the logic of “China does something that we think is bad, therefore we must do the same thing that we think is bad.”
- moate 6y ago
  So then how do you stop China from doing the bad thing?
  - baddox 6y ago
    Is that relevant? Do you think this will make any difference in China’s internal policies?
    - what_ever 6y ago
      It make difference to your country's companies to make business there.
    - moate 6y ago
      One assumption as to why "do the bad thing" is "because it will make China behave in the manner we want".
- njarboe 6y ago
  Tit-for-tat has been found to be the most effective strategy in prisoner dilemma type situations. If China lets us into their markets then we will let them into ours. This was the whole point of letting China join the WTO, but China has completely ignored any rulings against it by the WTO courts. It not playing fairly. These individual trade sanctions by the US are the only way to make China keep up its end of the deal.
  - woopwoop 6y ago
    Trade is basically the opposite of a prisoner's dilemma, though. Cooperation dominates defection.
tensor 6y ago
TikTok has only recently had any competitors from the west, and WeChat is still far and beyond any chat platform the west has offered. I have extreme doubt the western companies would at all be able to compete in China. They don't get the culture, they have inferior features and inferior user experience. In fact, if the west weren't so racist I suspect WeChat would dominate just like TikTok is dominating in the west.
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  That's the thing is that WeChat can exist in the US. In fact it does. It just doesn't get any traction except with Chinese Nationals communicating with their families. It's kind of absurd to think that platforms that literally dominate every single country in the world like Google and Facebook wouldn't similarly dominate in China if they were just allowed. TikTok is the first Chinese social app that's had any success in the West. That's why we're talking about this now and never needed to discuss it with WeChat. It's absolutely crazy that Chinese companies can compete fairly in Western markets yet the Chinese government can close their markets to Western companies. IMO, a trade war with China is long overdue. China hasn't played fairly in any sense . Trade wars suck for all involved but if you're not willing to do them, why would China not play by a double standard?
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    > It's absolutely crazy that Chinese companies can compete fairly in Western markets yet the Chinese government can close their markets to Western companies. The actual state of affairs is that Western companies do much more business in China than vice versa. It's been that way ever since China began opening up in the 1980s. There are more theoretical barriers to trade in China than in most developed countries, but that doesn't change the fact that there's more actual Western investment in China than vice versa. Whether China's protectionist measures (which have lessened over time) are acceptable depends on your ideas about economic development. There's a very respectable economic tradition (stretching back to Alexander Hamilton) that says that developing countries should enact certain protectionist measures. Most developed countries got where they are today using some level of protectionist policies (the US, Japan and South Korea are a few prominent examples).
burkaman 6y ago
> Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US?? For the same reasons that China should allow American companies to operate in China.
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
> China doesn’t allow many western companies to operate in China. This is simply false, yet it gets repeated on every discussion about China. Western companies are everywhere in China, and they make massive revenues there. The presence of Chinese companies in the West is tiny by comparison (if you want proof, just look at FDI figures in each direction). Anyone who's spent time in both places can see this. It's very difficult to discuss China-US trade issues when so many people begin from completely false assumptions about what the present situation is.
- fragmede 6y ago
  Two companies that are blocked in China, and are particularly relevant to this conversation, are Google and Facebook.
  - hungryhobo 6y ago
    facebook and google are given conditions that, if satisfied, would allow them to operate in china. the same cannot be said about tik tok and the us market
    - ngcc_hk 6y ago
      That is why China Win-Win. It has forced the conditions that is theirs as a totalitarian country. USA cannot enforce any condition because it is a free country. And they can come in with their values. But USA cannot go in with its value. Continue it is the downfall of the USA and humanity. That is why China has to stop Win-then-Win again (yes Win-Win is China win two times). Open market to assist China to limit their people freedom, that is a great move by Google if only money matter. And as said, China is poor of everything except money. Want this bad money driven out good one.
      - winrid 6y ago
        Free country doesn't mean you can't set rules or conditions to do business here. We do that all the time. In fact, we don't even let some companies do business with certain countries. We can definitely give TikTok an ultimatum - we just don't want to.
xster 6y ago
I think too much brain-cells are devoted to debating this point based on non-factual premises. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tiktok-china-state-media-accuses-us-of-trying-to-steal-the-app https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tiktok-china-state-medi... According to Lee Kai-Fu who launched Google in China: "Chinese laws are clear about what foreign companies can do to operate in China. In TikTok's case, though, the company was left no choice but to consider a forced sale." China doesn't not allow western companies to operate. Google proactively made the choice to exit China. I'm not arguing that they should have elected to follow Chinese laws but the actions the Chinese government took with western companies was not to either tell them to stop existing in the Chinese market or abdicate their ownership to a domestic company. Let's debate on non-imaginary premises.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  The Chinese government forces foreign companies to do business with a domestic company, which they then use to raid the foreign company's intellectual property, develop a localized state-backed clone product, which they then allow to "compete" and inevitably crush the foreign company's product. It's not as straightforward as outright "abdication of ownership to a domestic company," but the end-result is similar, and I'd argue it's more morally reprehensible. At least TikTok is going to get a check.
  - xhinker 6y ago
    Em... how to force. punish you if you don't run a business?
  - xster 6y ago
    Ya that's another very common frustration against an imaginary premise. Western companies that enter joint ventures in China with IP transfers are proactively done with executives who explicitly weigh the cost benefit of gaining the Chinese market and choose to do so. An equivalent here would be for ByteDance to choose to enter the US market knowing they need to oxymoronically abdicate ownership once they do.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
mam2 6y ago
Or there is actual national security issues at play they dont want to tell
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
peacefulhat 6y ago
> Would WeChat or TikTok exist if western chat and social media apps were given total access to Chinese markets??? WeChat caters to the needs of Chinese users. As far as I know, WeChat invented integration of payments in messaging apps and Western apps like Messenger and iMessage copied that. I don't think the Western apps have QR payments, which is very important to Chinese. And I don't think a Western app would have come up with the group hongbao exchange feature. TikTok doesn't have a surviving American equivalent so, yes. Definitely it would exist.
beaunative 6y ago
Google's dragonfly would allow it to operate in China. It didn't because of domestic pressure, not the Chinese government. There used to have a huge debate of that here on Hackernews. It would not be fair to say that China banned Google for protectionism reasons. At least for China, the government have a standard, a list of censorship requirement to follow. There are things a company can do to operate in China. While here now at the US, it's protectionism that targeted a specific company without doubt. I'd hardly call that the rule of law, would you?
zalkota 6y ago
This is correct, thank you for this reply.

by cwhiz 6y ago

bradleybuda 6y ago

Because allowing Chinese companies to operate in the US is good for American consumers. This isn’t a zero-sum game.

cwhiz 6y ago
This short sighted policy is what has led to the slow decay of the American middle class.
- vkou 6y ago
  No, the policy that lead to the decay of the American middle class is not China's rules on foreign investment. The policy that lead to that is American companies embracing globalism, which is, by the way, an American neo-liberal ideology.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    You can embrace globalism without damaging your economy. You just have to choose to only deal with countries that play fairly. China does not play fairly and, as such, we should not do business with them.
    - marsrover 6y ago
      I'm not in agreement or disagreement but I'm genuinely curious how you can embrace globalism without damaging your economy? I have found myself leaning more towards neo-liberalism in some aspects but I don't know how this piece fits in.
      - yahnu 6y ago
        USA has embraced globalism and benefitting from it. American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders. "The recent stability in the share of adults living in middle-income households marks a shift from a decades-long downward trend. From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points. But that shift was not all down the economic ladder. Indeed, the increase in the share of adults who are upper income was greater than the increase in the share who are lower income over that period, a sign of economic progress overall." https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-american-middle-class-is-stable-in-size-but-losing-ground-financially-to-upper-income-families/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/06/the-america...
        njarboe 6y ago
        "American middle-class wealth has moved to upper-class rather than to outsiders." As your quote says, it's not the wealth that has moved per say, but that people have moved upward out of the middle class and brought that wealth with them with more people moving up than moving down.
        yahnu 6y ago
        Right. I see how my wording can be wrong. I saw some comments (in this thread and some others) that seems to be of the opinion that USA has not benefitted by embracing globalization. That opinion is in contrast to what I have seen in data analysis/reports. So I wanted to say that maybe problem is not that USA hasn't benefitted from globalization but rather that benefit hasn't been distributed appropriately. I'm not from USA and my knowledge comes by reading about news reports and expert data analysis so I might be missing something.
  - 13415 6y ago
    Globalism is and always was inevitable and has in fact started already 200 years ago. It's also not a problem. A problem is how countries deal with the middle class and how they transform their society when there are shifts in production. For example, it's not China's fault that the average salary of a US CEO was 361 times higher than that of a factory worker in 2018, as opposed to only having been 20 times higher in the 1950s. What we see right now is really just the emergence of China as an economic super-power, thanks to their gigantic internal market and their technological advances. This was predicted for the past 40 years or so and it nothing to do with the problems that the US is facing. These problems are mostly internal.
    - novaRom 6y ago
      China is basically: low start + motivation + good education + low costs + state level protectionism + long term planning
AbrahamParangi 6y ago
Consider every concern about facebook having too much power on things like elections. Now imagine if facebook were controlled by an adversarial authoritarian regime.
- zolosa 6y ago
  Or looking at the PRISM program it's better to ban Facebook and it's children companies rather than imagining .
  - AbrahamParangi 6y ago
    It would not be at all unreasonable for other countries to ban US social media companies.
sidlls 6y ago
How is it good for American consumers? Their privacy is further eroded in service of a violently oppressive totalitarian state. Also, the companies these Chinese companies compete against do not have equal access to Chinese markets, providing a significant advantage to Chinese companies: the supposed benefit to the consumer (reduced prices due to competition) erodes quickly in such an environment.
- Cookingboy 6y ago
  > Also, the companies these Chinese companies compete against do not have equal access to Chinese markets That's just not true. All American tech companies can operate in China if they follow local laws, that's why Skype and iMessage are popular in China. Chinese companies have to follow the same local laws as well. Google/Facebook, etc voluntarily pulled out of the Chinese market because they don't want to follow China's draconian tech laws.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    Those laws require Chinese companies to have ownership stakes, sometimes majority ownership stakes, if not explicitly then effectively. That isn't "equal access".
    - Cookingboy 6y ago
      Again, complete lies. Ownership requirement is only for joint ventures. Both Apple and Microsoft operate in China in full capacity and neither companies are majority owned by the Chinese lol.
      - sidlls 6y ago
        You're quibbling over technicalities. For most tech companies, operating in China requires a substantial relationship with Chinese owned business entities and partners, often tacitly, if not explicitly written by law, also requiring some shareholding or officer/executive relationship to manage the tangled web of CCP corruption.
alexryan 6y ago
The CCP has a saying. Win-win means we win twice.

alluro2 6y ago

When you say "steal" and "imbalance that China has created" - you expect to move almost all design, planning and manufacturing to China gradually over decades of time, give them all the technology because they are just "low-level workers", embrace what they build themselves because it's cheaper and good enough, and for them to be happy, in perpetuum, to receive a fraction of the profits? This situation was not created by China - it's just completely expected consequences of decades of un-strategical behavior which is now starting to bite back.

will4274 6y ago
I find your comment to be in bad faith. You failed to address Chinese bans of American companies, which was the thrust of parent's comment, and which is obviously the unfair imbalance China created. Quoting imbalance but ignoring the example is bad faith.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  Very few American companies are banned from China. The parent's comment is based on false premises about the economic relationship between the US and China.
  - notSupplied 6y ago
    Yes, China very selectively bans American companies, just as the US is now very selectively banning the same types of companies. It’s just Mercantilism: be open in all ways except the key industries you wish to develop domestically. I don’t think mercantilism is fundamentally evil (it’s how Japan and South Korea became wealthy first world nations at certain American industries expense) but don’t cry when your trade partners bite back.
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
It's quite amazing how many people believe that a poor country like the China of the 1990s and early 2000s could manage to hoodwink the Western world into accepting an imbalanced relationship favoring China. The fact is that Western companies benefitted massively from China's opening-up, and that China was forced to undergo many painful reforms in order to join the WTO. An entire generation of Chinese workers lost their social safety network as a result of the breaking up of the state-run sector. The joint venture and IP transfer requirements, which have been rolled back over time, were a small price to pay in exchange for accessing a massive pool of cheap labor and a rapidly growing consumer market.

jdietrich 6y ago

>Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US? The US gains very substantial economic benefits from being an attractive place for international companies to do business. Foreign investors know that when they invest in America, they're getting a stable regulatory environment and a reasonably trustworthy civil legal system. If America decides to undermine that trust for short-term gain, there will be a substantial long-term cost. You might believe that hostile trade policies prevent American companies from competing in the Chinese market, but that's starkly contradicted by the number of American companies for whom China is a key market. Apple earn $11bn a year in China. Wal-Mart have thousands of stores there. Yum! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) have 40% of the Chinese fast food market and make more revenue there than anywhere else. Starbucks have 70% of the Chinese coffee market. The shelves of Chinese convenience stores are groaning with American-owned brands. An all-out trade war with China might be appealing, but be under no illusions that it'll be all upside for America. If China want to put the hurt on America, they have more levers to pull and more staying power. It's definitely not a fight you want to lose, but it might not even be a fight worth winning. China aren't thinking about next quarter or next year, they're thinking about the next generation. Where does the US see itself in 2050?

godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
I highly doubt China has more levers then the US when it comes to a trade war. China can't feed itself past subsistence level without imports. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/ China runs on oil just like every other modern economy, and they have pitiful amounts locally. They are the largest importer in the world and they absolutely need it to keep flowing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/10/17/china-is-the-worlds-largest-oil--gas-importer/#687831345441 https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/10/17/china-i... The US can feed itself domestically, and we can supply our own energy domestically. All we have to do is no longer put merchants heading toward China under the US navies protection and the CCP will be in serious trouble very quickly. Note - I'm not even saying we have to attack them, we just stop responding to any requests for help from them and let the world know. China relies on the US enforced world order to survive in its current form. The US relies on China for convenience, not for survival. Would it be wise to do what I just said? I don't know, and I'm not advocating for it, I just find it funny when people say China would so obviously win a trade war when they are definitely in the worse position at a fundamental level.

baddox 6y ago

I don’t follow the logic of “China does something that we think is bad, therefore we must do the same thing that we think is bad.”

moate 6y ago
So then how do you stop China from doing the bad thing?
- baddox 6y ago
  Is that relevant? Do you think this will make any difference in China’s internal policies?
  - what_ever 6y ago
    It make difference to your country's companies to make business there.
  - moate 6y ago
    One assumption as to why "do the bad thing" is "because it will make China behave in the manner we want".
njarboe 6y ago
Tit-for-tat has been found to be the most effective strategy in prisoner dilemma type situations. If China lets us into their markets then we will let them into ours. This was the whole point of letting China join the WTO, but China has completely ignored any rulings against it by the WTO courts. It not playing fairly. These individual trade sanctions by the US are the only way to make China keep up its end of the deal.
- woopwoop 6y ago
  Trade is basically the opposite of a prisoner's dilemma, though. Cooperation dominates defection.

tensor 6y ago

TikTok has only recently had any competitors from the west, and WeChat is still far and beyond any chat platform the west has offered. I have extreme doubt the western companies would at all be able to compete in China. They don't get the culture, they have inferior features and inferior user experience. In fact, if the west weren't so racist I suspect WeChat would dominate just like TikTok is dominating in the west.

dumbfoundded 6y ago
That's the thing is that WeChat can exist in the US. In fact it does. It just doesn't get any traction except with Chinese Nationals communicating with their families. It's kind of absurd to think that platforms that literally dominate every single country in the world like Google and Facebook wouldn't similarly dominate in China if they were just allowed. TikTok is the first Chinese social app that's had any success in the West. That's why we're talking about this now and never needed to discuss it with WeChat. It's absolutely crazy that Chinese companies can compete fairly in Western markets yet the Chinese government can close their markets to Western companies. IMO, a trade war with China is long overdue. China hasn't played fairly in any sense . Trade wars suck for all involved but if you're not willing to do them, why would China not play by a double standard?
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  > It's absolutely crazy that Chinese companies can compete fairly in Western markets yet the Chinese government can close their markets to Western companies. The actual state of affairs is that Western companies do much more business in China than vice versa. It's been that way ever since China began opening up in the 1980s. There are more theoretical barriers to trade in China than in most developed countries, but that doesn't change the fact that there's more actual Western investment in China than vice versa. Whether China's protectionist measures (which have lessened over time) are acceptable depends on your ideas about economic development. There's a very respectable economic tradition (stretching back to Alexander Hamilton) that says that developing countries should enact certain protectionist measures. Most developed countries got where they are today using some level of protectionist policies (the US, Japan and South Korea are a few prominent examples).

burkaman 6y ago

> Why should the US allow Chinese companies to operate in the US?? For the same reasons that China should allow American companies to operate in China.

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

> China doesn’t allow many western companies to operate in China. This is simply false, yet it gets repeated on every discussion about China. Western companies are everywhere in China, and they make massive revenues there. The presence of Chinese companies in the West is tiny by comparison (if you want proof, just look at FDI figures in each direction). Anyone who's spent time in both places can see this. It's very difficult to discuss China-US trade issues when so many people begin from completely false assumptions about what the present situation is.

fragmede 6y ago
Two companies that are blocked in China, and are particularly relevant to this conversation, are Google and Facebook.
- hungryhobo 6y ago
  facebook and google are given conditions that, if satisfied, would allow them to operate in china. the same cannot be said about tik tok and the us market
  - ngcc_hk 6y ago
    That is why China Win-Win. It has forced the conditions that is theirs as a totalitarian country. USA cannot enforce any condition because it is a free country. And they can come in with their values. But USA cannot go in with its value. Continue it is the downfall of the USA and humanity. That is why China has to stop Win-then-Win again (yes Win-Win is China win two times). Open market to assist China to limit their people freedom, that is a great move by Google if only money matter. And as said, China is poor of everything except money. Want this bad money driven out good one.
    - winrid 6y ago
      Free country doesn't mean you can't set rules or conditions to do business here. We do that all the time. In fact, we don't even let some companies do business with certain countries. We can definitely give TikTok an ultimatum - we just don't want to.

xster 6y ago

I think too much brain-cells are devoted to debating this point based on non-factual premises. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tiktok-china-state-media-accuses-us-of-trying-to-steal-the-app https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/tiktok-china-state-medi... According to Lee Kai-Fu who launched Google in China: "Chinese laws are clear about what foreign companies can do to operate in China. In TikTok's case, though, the company was left no choice but to consider a forced sale." China doesn't not allow western companies to operate. Google proactively made the choice to exit China. I'm not arguing that they should have elected to follow Chinese laws but the actions the Chinese government took with western companies was not to either tell them to stop existing in the Chinese market or abdicate their ownership to a domestic company. Let's debate on non-imaginary premises.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
The Chinese government forces foreign companies to do business with a domestic company, which they then use to raid the foreign company's intellectual property, develop a localized state-backed clone product, which they then allow to "compete" and inevitably crush the foreign company's product. It's not as straightforward as outright "abdication of ownership to a domestic company," but the end-result is similar, and I'd argue it's more morally reprehensible. At least TikTok is going to get a check.
- xhinker 6y ago
  Em... how to force. punish you if you don't run a business?
- xster 6y ago
  Ya that's another very common frustration against an imaginary premise. Western companies that enter joint ventures in China with IP transfers are proactively done with executives who explicitly weigh the cost benefit of gaining the Chinese market and choose to do so. An equivalent here would be for ByteDance to choose to enter the US market knowing they need to oxymoronically abdicate ownership once they do.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

mam2 6y ago

Or there is actual national security issues at play they dont want to tell

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

peacefulhat 6y ago

> Would WeChat or TikTok exist if western chat and social media apps were given total access to Chinese markets??? WeChat caters to the needs of Chinese users. As far as I know, WeChat invented integration of payments in messaging apps and Western apps like Messenger and iMessage copied that. I don't think the Western apps have QR payments, which is very important to Chinese. And I don't think a Western app would have come up with the group hongbao exchange feature. TikTok doesn't have a surviving American equivalent so, yes. Definitely it would exist.

beaunative 6y ago

Google's dragonfly would allow it to operate in China. It didn't because of domestic pressure, not the Chinese government. There used to have a huge debate of that here on Hackernews. It would not be fair to say that China banned Google for protectionism reasons. At least for China, the government have a standard, a list of censorship requirement to follow. There are things a company can do to operate in China. While here now at the US, it's protectionism that targeted a specific company without doubt. I'd hardly call that the rule of law, would you?

zalkota 6y ago

This is correct, thank you for this reply.