Some people here are wondering about the implications of this. What this means IMO is that all Chinese investments in SV need to be liquidated at fire sale prices in the next 45 days. Regardless of how people here feel about China this is a huge escalation. The US is inflicting huge losses on Chinese companies for no clear violation of US laws on their part. The pandoras box is now open.
Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China has some pretty serious means available to it for escalation. China can ban Boeing from China forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat.
The whole thing is pretty stupid overall. Most people don't realize that during the 2008 crisis it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. China and the US are interdependent and hold up the global system upon which global growth depends. If China slows down as a result of all this that reduces global growth. Pushing China to the wall can make them take extreme steps like undercut the entire dollar based financial order leading to mass instability. The US might come out victorious anyway but its not worth the risks. Not to mention a war which if it breaks out could lead to WW3.
Previous attempts to contain China were much more tactful with things like the TPP and the Iran deal. Right now the world is hurtling towards the abyss and most people here don't even realise it.
A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.
I think we are already passed the point of any of this mattering. Increasingly the rhetoric seems to me to just be: what matters isn't who is in the right or what is just or fair. Increasingly the only thing that matters is which side you are on. Are you with us or are you against us? It's just dogma at this point.
In this kind of environment people that are rational either stick to their tribe or learn to keep their mouths shut because it's no longer safe to express a contrarian opinion (just like in China). You see already see this in comments sections throughout western publications and forums where questioning policy or taking the opposite side means you are a bot/stooge/unpatriotic/50 cent warrior, etc, etc, etc.
I might get downvoted for this but I think it's a very real possibility. Withdraw the embassy from Beijing, recognize Taiwan and force a embargo of all Taiwanese/Korean and Japanese semiconductor supplies and components to Mainland China.
Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it.
There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
You can be sure that "war games" are being played out routinely.
The problem here is that this is an obvious escalation with US as the aggressor and not all US allies are willing to follow the US into war as the current administration is seen as unreliable.
You even had the former and current (!) prime ministers of Australia warning of high likelihood of a war between China and the US within the next 3 months. Where the next 3 months of course is the period of the US presidential election indicating that they clearly see a connection between the US elections and increased China tensions.
Is it really the US making the first move? Facebook is blocked in China as are several other big countries. Granted, this is a ban after the company made inroads, but it seems that China has been doing this for a long time now and in many industries.
Who made the first move is kind of a philosophical question. And the tech war is part of a bigger "war" that is currently unfolding going from rhetorics to trade to military maneuvers.
What is more important is how it is being perceived amongst other countries around the south china sea. And as far as I can tell the US does not have the support it normally would have. Even from surefire allies such as Australia.
China has been doing moves like this for a long time so I don’t know how the US is the first aggressor here. Several US tech companies have been banned in China for a while at this point.
So what are we China now? Also I'm not sure it's quite true those companies were banned. Google voluntarily pulled out of the Chinese market, and re-entered.
So how do you explain the re-entering the market by Google?
The "rules" were sovereign rules China applied and it's not as if other search engines or companies in China could get away without following those same rules... plus, such rules are now being applied to ByteDance and WeChat in the USA to make them "voluntarily" pull out as well and this of courses legitimizes China's past and present actions (which is fundamentally why I do not think we should be going down this route).
It's basically admitting defeat if we start using the same policies as China. China owns up to their policies of censorship and heavy-handed market control. They're not hiding that fact. If we start down that path too then we're just adopting their system and admitting we can't beat them with a free market and freedom of access to apps/information.
Keep in mind that Trump's rationale for blocking WeChat is that it is "allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives." That's basically saying the people are too stupid and must have their information access controlled—which, as you may know, is exactly the communist part of China's modus operandi.
> The problem here is that this is an obvious escalation with US as the aggressor and not all US allies are willing to follow the US into war as the current administration is seen as unreliable.
I don't see how US is the aggressor. The kind of control CCP has over these companies is well known and as someone who is not an American, I was surprised why the US admin had not taken stern measures till now. This standoff was initiated when China decided to kick out American companies for not subscribing to their censorship policies. And the way companies like WeChat feed into CCP's censorship framework is well known.
I'm classing it as a certainty. Have a read of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and work out what it necessitates, and that to be done very soon.
Even so, I believe the US has 'missed the bus'. It needed to have initiated vigorous conflict earlier this year to be sure of victory in that coming war. It can't start anything worthwhile now until at least the next Spring-Summer campaign season. By then China will have had another 12 months of growth, and the US another 12 months of decline.
What does victory mean in the era of mutually assured destruction? I don't see how a shooting war between the US and China could not end in both sides getting nuked.
> I don't see how a shooting war between the US and China could not end in both sides getting nuked.
There is only one country in the world which is reliably able to afford being nuked, and has "surviving first, and second strike" as part of its many doctrines.
The only major country against which MAD is not so assured is China.
Invasion on Iraq led to many deaths and was based on false premises and similar "disagreement in management styles". War with China would be a terrible calamity. I don't understand why, but the US is turning into a bad actor, and the most scary thing is that it's convinced it's a good actor.
Which is why nobody will push the button, even if they're being invaded, they'll just accept being occupied and mount a resistance. MAD always relied on a fiction of natural insanity that doesn't actually exist. I don't think any tactician takes widespread nuclear exchanges seriously as a likely outcome to any contemporary global conflict.
China could also just wait 3 more months until the election and decide action after that. If the presidency changes they are able to deal with a more rational player.
China is already being very patient in waiting until the reelection. The US military is flaunting its military hardware near the mainland, and all this time China is basically ignoring the threat.
But the Trump administration is very active in launching more attacks. If you follow the news on what they've been doing to Chinese companies, the past month has been absolutely insane. The attacks are only getting faster and faster, as the Trump administration gets increasingly desperate to win a reelection.
Another problem is that all these attacks leave behind permanent damage. It's not just a matter of ignoring the attacks. I fear that at some point, we get past some boiling point, and things erupt into a hot war.
>Conducting justice shouldn't be seen as a deliberate attempt to increase tension
-Adds more companies to the entity list over Xinjiang
>Black listing companies involved in perpetuating genocide against the Uighurs doesn't seem controversial to me
-Bans federal contractors buying from Huawei
>National security
-Ups ante in the South China sea
>Allowing China to claim that region puts a substantial amount of trade in jeopardy, due to many established shipping routes going through there. China is the aggressor here, regardless of what the media tries to portray.
-Blacklists officials
>You need to be more specific, but I assume you are referring to more Uighur genocide related sanctions
-Removes Hong Kong's special status
>Following the terms of the Hong Kong special status trade agreement that hinges on it being a self-governed state. (It no longer is)
-Daily Cold War rhetoric from Pompeo
>Sabre rattling, but could be taken as aggressive action depending on whether Pompeo was talking about any of the points above. If so, then it's warranted.
-Restricts Chinese student visas
>The world is in lock-down. Even countries heavily reliant on chinese student spending, have temporarily restricted such visas.
-Ends fulbright scholar program Hong Kong
>Why continue such programs when the status of such a country changes? Those programs and trade agreements have to be renegotiated.
-Contemplating banning TikTok
>Reciprocal treatment of western social media. So far the first and only deliberate escalation of tensions against China, on this list. Justified... but certainly an escalation.
> as the Trump administration gets increasingly desperate to win a reelection.
Or maybe, just maybe, he is doing something which he believes is the right thing to do and will help Americans? The ratcheting up could just be a tactic to force the next administration into a position to actually deal with the dysfunctional relationship rather than always rolling over and hoping things will be different like previous administrations.
Go and read John Bolton's book, Xi made it clear to Trump in person that he wants Trump to have two more terms. An irrational US president undermining the US credibility in all possible aspects is good for China. Why Chinese would possibly want this trend to change?
Bolton has many strong opinions that are not necessarily shared with the rest of the world -- not that he's wrong, but do use critical thinking. There are pros and cons here, like Trump causing short-term trade losses with China while they're dealing with political instability back home. Is economic stability worth more than relative world influence? Hard to say. Also, Xi telling Trump that he should have more terms is a classic way to play to a narcissist; it shouldn't be interpreted as anything more than flattery.
Honestly I think China has very little to gain from interfering on either side of the US election, and potentially a lot to lose. Russia, on the other hand...
A more realistic scenario is that US have a 3 months deadline to fix their political system, as rationality need an empiric and humane system to work within.
White House, no, but no doubt there are career officers and civilians in the Pentagon who have gamed this out in excruciating detail. I'm sure this was done even before the current administration came into power.
A lot of people ascribe malice to him, but it’s clear as day that he was in over his head with the entire project. Basically 0 of his goals have been achieved 17 years in.
So I would say that while the appearance of competent war games was there, it was a charade.
He was involved in a war of aggression, and his company made a bit of money both for destruction and rebuiling, did it not? And we can't even begin to guess how many "buddies" profited. At any rate, he's not in jail, and I think that is way too much success than is acceptable. He may be a moron, he certainly is a fool, but then what does that say about the ~300 million people in whose name he did his crimes, to live happily and smugly ever after?
Well yes that's how these things usually go, but haven't a bunch of white people left? Doesn't make the economic wrong right, but does at least crudely function as justice.
Symbolic appeasement without an actual change in living conditions for the majority of the populace who suffered the brunt of the exploitation is not justice
Punishing the perpetrators and undoing the damage are two different things. Absolutely more of the second is needed. But what I mentioned functions as a crude form of the first.
Like it or not, kicking out white people isn't just symbolism.
To be clear, I agree that transfer of power was a classic neoliberal failure, and the situation is a travesty.
> There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
The Velvet Revolution comes to mind. Of course there is a possibility/threat of violent escalation in negotiating these things, but rational actors can make the calculus that getting a good enough deal guaranteed is better than fighting and potentially loosing a better one. However, it requires a non-totalitarian view of the world (i.e. the others are not enemies no matter what and must be punished for their bad deeds doesn't really allow you to negotiate in a de-escalatory manner).
> There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
There was an interesting book published about two years ago (I'm too lazy to search for it) which showed that wealth "re-calibration" only really happened as a result of violent change. I know I wouldn't be here in front of a computer writing this comment if it hadn't been for WW2 that brought communist rule to my Eastern-European country, which communist rule brought forced industrialisation with the help of mass education (that was of course free, unlike before WW2). That benefited my parents who could make the "leap" from the countryside to the city. Probably a new war could similarly eliminate the wealth inequality in countries like the US.
Actually I looked for it and I'm 99% sure this is the book: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" [1]
> Probably a new war could similarly eliminate the wealth inequality in countries like the US.
Perhaps just by destroying wealth. It’s unlikely that any violence could improve the US middle class since it’s already richer than the middle class in most other countries. Best you can do at that point is just try to eliminate the wealthy if you’re fixated on income inequality.
Banning wechat feels like pure Pompeo. Trump probably doesn't even know what wechat is. The craziest bat shit tier China-hawk already got purged, but this is still Pompeo, and if anything hes... good at manufacturing consent.
China is a lot more stable, both economically and politically, than the Soviet Union. While it's not quite par with the United States yet, China has a population 4x the size of the United States, which gives them unprecedented scale to build out and deploy new tech that can easily leapfrog any edge the United States has right now.
In the long term, the only thing going for the US are alliances with other developed countries and democracies. But the current administration doesn't seem to care very much about that.
I don’t think raw population numbers are as useful as they seem. Most ruling political states have been comprised of a fairly small group of elites. Think Britain in India, or even the Mughals before them. We should also consider that Canada and Mexico have been/can be more integrated into a single economic unit.
The more important part is technological innovation, and so far, I remain unconvinced that a closed totalitarian system will have as much innovation as an open one, in the long term.
Otherwise, agreed that the US does need its allies, though I don’t necessarily agree that it has alienated them. If you look at the real events, and not merely the media talking heads, there is absolutely a growing sense of unity against China. See: India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, increased NATO budget commitments, to name a few.
> The more important part is technological innovation, and so far, I remain unconvinced that a closed totalitarian system will have as much innovation as an open one, in the long term.
It's better to characterize/qualify Chinese style of governance as a top-down meritocratic totalitarian government. Policymakers in China are theoretically able to make decisions that are optimal to achieve certain policy goals, say x% economic growth. In contrast, democracies set policy goals and make decisions through the messy process of achieving political consensus.
IMO, private innovation happens when a combination of factors align: free consumer choice, a large market under a common set of rules and stable political conditions. I don't think the Chinese style of governance prevents any of this.
Public innovation happens through well-funded universities and taxpayer-funded research grants. China pushes one step further at times by funding new technology/research directly through state owned/sponsored enterprises.
I think there are genuine fears within US policy circles that the stability afforded by economic growth under a meritocratic totalitarian government could give China an edge over countries like the US, which have to work with the overheads of a democracy. I believe observers in the future will agree that these fears were not unfounded.
I agree with most of what you’re saying. I would just add that much of the US’s power comes from cultural capital. New York, Hollywood, the widespread use of English, tech companies that rely on free speech (e.g. Twitter or YouTube), and so on. I’d argue that it is impossible to separate culture from technology.
I don’t believe that China can ever get remotely close to this cultural influence if it retains an authoritarian system. The artistic ecosystem will never form.
That's directly contradicted by the success of media exports from China lately, already in Asia but it's beginning to cross the language barrier into English Youtube, despite the firewall. In fact it shows it's money and competition that matter, and there is plenty of both in China.
Links? Examples? Some obscure series on YouTube isn’t particularly relevant. My narrative will be “directly contradicted” when the Chinese equivalent of Brad Pitt, Disney, NBA, MLB, NFL, Warner Brothers, etc. are household names in America and the world.
Chinese restricts thought which by definition will take a whole range of creative ideas off the table. They're limiting their tool set in ways that can't be overcome within their governance system.
That’s not meritocratic in the normal sense of the word. Nobody is allowed to ignore CCP policy goals hoping to prove that they are flawed with data later. You’ll be in a re-education camp long before then.
Now it may be true that you can quickly climb the ladder if you never challenge anything, but that’s a pretty narrow set of merit being recognized. It’s just barely an improvement over promoting family members. In both cases, no fundamental change can legitimately bubble up based on merit.
A system that does not respond well to criticism will inevitably fail on its own... in which case they don't need their apps to be banned for that to happen.
History has shown that countries can suppress dissidents for hundreds of years. This current rendition of the Chinese government could easily survive decades while suppressing criticism (which they obviously do).
So you are justifying American imperialism in "helping countries along" by forcibly collapsing unfavorable regimes?
If only the US motives were actually that altruistic, but in reality US intervention in foreign regimes were mostly to protect its interests rather than any actual ideals.
>See: India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, increased NATO budget commitments, to name a few.
Apologies for unstructured reply:
There are other real events too, like how trade between China and ASEAN increased throughout covid and and the general trend is more integration. The real events you outlined are also still filtered through FVEY talking heads. People are misattributing increased militarily budgets in the region as growing hint solidifying US coalition when many of these increases are because these countries no longer see US as a reliable partner in SCS, a pattern that started under Obama. See Australians increased military budget citing specifically so, or how their foreign minister upheld US position on SCS but publicly distanced herself from Trump/Pompeo bellicose China policy. Philippines just bailed SCS drills. Half of Vietnamese military acquisitions capabilities target Malaysia, like wise for other countries in the region. It's not all to challenge China - people forget SCS is a 6 party dispute with various overlapping claims. Like when Taiwan AND China both sent ship to assert their claims after PCA ruling. BTW their increased funding and capabilities is directly a result of increased growth from China's growth. Or that China puts more warship tonnage than the entire region combined every year, by multitudes. Or how US military experts want access to Japanese basing to spreadout US asset risk against Chinese strike, but rampant covid in Japanese US bases just made sure that will never happen. Or this meme [1] that explains India's geopolitical situation, China is not the only big country with nervous neighbors.
Or how moving manufacturing out of China is still an ongoing experiment and ultimately one first started by China herself, where China gets to decide winners and losers. Months after Samsung closed their last phone plant in China, they outsourced their low-end models under a Chinese ODM. Also Vietnam is full, all their infrastructure including human capital are at capacity and will take years to cultivate. Or how people celebrate Foxconn recently moving 1B iphone manufacturing to India but don't mention they've invested 8B into IC packaging in China the same week. Or most of final assembling happening in India is still completely reliant on Chinese supply chains. Or how India basically needs 30 years of Chinese reforms to reach comparable development status as China and China could only achieve that due to authoritarian government structure... does India's messy democracy stand a chance? History and past attempts at reform suggests no. Or how automation + ASEAN competition means India will only get to grab a fraction of Chinese manufacturing before they get another 300M unemployed, angry youths because they don't have one-child policy. China still has that many in "poverty" even after peak manufacturing phase. IMO there's just not enough global demand for India to ever replicate China or reach parity. And that demographic boon of of youth is going to turn into a curse. Rest of ASEAN is the same, if you divide all of Chinese manufacturing at peak, with minimal automation, that fed entire world, ~400M jobs, there's simply not enough to go around. Again, China controls the supply chain, she will decide winners for the next 10 years (this number is important), not the west. She simply hasn't enacted extreme policies like US entities list, but could literally cripple many sectors in any country it chooses if she does.
The geopolitics of the region is complex, and everyone in the region is hedging between US and China for posturing, everyone is building up - through growth enabled by China - because they doubt US commitment under current admin that will take years to fix. Except US analysts thinks unless they start a war with China by 2025-2030 latest (that 10 years), Chinese advantage in SCS will be insurmountable. Incidentally, it will take a few years for TSMC to finish their Arizona plant, otherwise no one gets 7nm chips for a while. At the end of the day, only US China-hawks wants a war, everyone else in region has too much to lose, Chinese economy and supply chain feeds the entire regions growth, especially post covid just like post 2008 GFC. And in the south, literally by controlling mekong water supply in down river countries. And even if there is a war where China loses, unless China is completely dismantled, she'll have the industrial capability to destroy any SCS infrastructure via missiles for perpetuity. The future of SCS is already decided in a sense. China has too much industrial capital now to ever not be a geopolitical reality in the region - industrialization is why North Korea can't feed their people but still build inter-continental ballistic missiles. China will always have the capability to shutdown ASEAN and turn everyone into losers. This holds true even if China is blockaded from all outside resources, China is not Japan in WW2, it doesn't have enough domestic resources to maintain huge economic growth, but it has more than enough to be completely self sufficient on a war economy, even if everyone has to ride bikes and eat rice. It could literally revert to a hermit kingdom and lob missiles forever, in which case the entire region loses while US wins. Everyone knows this.
USSR was isolated from the American economy. USA is doing everything in its power to destroy top tier Chinese companies and exploit local political situations.
I dismissed it as mere hyperbole in 2016 when people suggested this to me. Now I feel it has a significant probability of actually happening.
Also, I recently watched a documentary on the start of Nazi Germany. The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
How should they? The average person has no clue of Nazi Germany, let alone what factors made it possible. Many (young) Americans today think everyone in Germany is still a Nazi.
> The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
I'm just listening to the "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" audiobook; a bit dated now (written in the '70s) but also written by someone who was in Germany during the whole time. There are a lot of parallels, but according to him, there are a lot of key differences (caveat -- haven't independently checked these characterizations):
* Germany did not have a strong democratic history; unlike both England and France, which had strong movements towards democracy hundreds of years before, Germany was a functional military dictatorship up until the end of WW I. Hitler could openly say that democracy was a bad idea, and lots of rank-and-file Germans agreed with him.
* Germany had a very strong army that was authoritarian, more or less an independent political entity, and sympathetic to Hitler's aims
* Germany had a very biased judiciary. While leftists were sentenced to death for treason for simply reporting violations of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ended up spending only 9 months in jail for actually attempting a violent coup. This wasn't just because Hitler was popular or charimatic: loads of nationalists / authoritarian rightists had similarly soft punishments.
The US has a strong cultural affinity for democracy; the military is not, at the moment, sympathetic to a dictatorship; and while according to some reports, some police departments are more sympathetic towards right-wing demonstrators than left-wing demonstrators, the judiciary is not.
In other words, we have a lot more institutions that would need to be subverted before we were in the kind of danger Germany was in the 1920s. Still, better to be aware of the dangers and do what we can to oppose them sooner rather than later.
While I think there are differences, the similarities are striking enough to be of concern. For example, the deployment of a paramilitary-like force in Portland makes me think back to what I've read about the early days of the SS.
With respect to the biased judiciary, the way the courts are being stacked in the US may well result in something similar. The AG appears to be already fairly biased (compromised?).
Yes, there are differences still, even in the situations I describe above, but the similarities are worrying.
I think they are both close to it. China is more obvious about it, and their iron-fist approach is perhaps a little less scary than the west's "normalise the atrocities" approach. China is a somewhat stagnant regime, perhaps somewhat set in their ways, yet the west comes across as an accelerating regime, becoming scarier faster.
The key difference for me (at least based on my own anecdata from speaking with people from China) is that Chinese people are not blind to the problems within their politics and government. Especially, the youth recognise the oppressive nature of the regime.
In the West, however, there is a subset of people for whom certain populist political figures can do no wrong. These people are happy to tolerate any "eccentricities", and perhaps don't understand what they might be enabling. And, unfortunately, the enablers are not a small minority.
For example, one guy even claimed he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose a single vote; his supporters applauded in agreement.
China already has concentration camps, heavy censorship, its a dictatorship and forcefully controls the population, and it's not just he "one child policy", its the sterilization of Uyghur men, and the forced marriage of their woman. All evidence points to china treating Uyghurs worse than Nazis treated Jews pre-war (Final solution was during WW2)
I the only difference between China and Nazi Germany from a human rights perspective, is that China hasn't declared any war.
Still, here in the west Nazis is the greatest evil ever, while China is complicated, and even some communist genociders are loved.
I'm not defending Nazis, I'm just staing that their evil is not unparalleled, and there exists a current nation that reeks of the same evil, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it.
Sure, the west is a mess with all the political tensions, but all that is just blinding to what is happening outside.
I think increasingly over the last year, dogmatic thinking and fantastical thinking related to several important topics are becoming mainstream, chief among them China. What's disheartening to me is that not only are neocons and Steve Bannon type ideologues pushing hard on this, it seems the majority of "liberals" do not really object to their views or actions on China. Ask yourself this: if you believe the Trump administration is corrupt, inept and acting out of self interest, how can you possibly think their strategy against China (the one foreign policy they pursued with most of their resources) is sound or good for American interest? So Trump botched covid responses that badly but he just got China right out of sheer luck?
I think the unfortunate explanation is that many Americans are now quite vindictive against the whole concept of China and would not mind any action that seem to damage it. Instead of looking at the issue objectively they simply want to believe whatever hurts must be wise. It's making me wonder if unthinkable disasters may actually happen out of sheer stupidity and irrationality.
>it seems the majority of "liberals" do not really object to their views or actions on China
Why would they? Less than equally free trade over the last ~30yr has driven a lot of blue collar voters into the arms of people who make crude promises to bring jobs back.
Many people would like to see more tactful foreign policy by the US but you'd be hard pressed to find people who think the status quo with regard to China was not in serious need of adjustment.
> Increasingly the only thing that matters is which side you are on
You mean, what matters to the political and economic elites in the US, perhaps. In the rest of the world, most of us (IMNSHO) don't share this outlook, nor would we like to be on any one of the two sides.
China is likely playing the higher ground to see who wins in November. Biden will undo all of this and go back to ceding America’s prosperity to the dictatorship of China.
That’s the thing, I hate trump badly but he is at least partially right in China. The problem is working alone doesn’t work even if you are the US. And trump has no friends left so there is just him going alone. This was one of the reasons for the TPP.
Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ?
China can force any company out of the country for any arbitrary reason whatsoever. As far as I know, they are still banning Houston Rockets games because Morey supported Hong Kong in a tweet.
More importantly, China has acted unilaterally in the past to inflict pain on western companies in preference of domestic firms. What’s new is the US doing it back.
Tesla was one of the first US companies to operate with the level of autonomy they have in China. Perhaps there is some retribution from the CCP, but such is the consequence of doing business with a totalitarian state.
Why is this downvoted? It’s true. Everything the US is doing, China has been doing for decades one thousand fold. Whether that’s right or wrong is a different issue.
Our country is founded on a free market economy and competition. If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
If we decide that rounding up Muslims is a no good very bad idea it follows that we should probably try to do less business with those who do or at the very least do business on terms less favorable to them.
We may want to start with that as the official reason then instead of "national security." Trump is clearly not even trying to pretend to care about that issue.
I think the scope and actions matter. Responding to tariffs with tariffs makes perfect sense, for instance. Punishing individuals makes less sense (eg. if china decided to send all expat americans in china to concentration camps, doing the same to chinese americans wouldn't make sense).
>If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
It's a good sign that a US company can outcompete a chinese company, even with a handicap, but it's a not a desirable situation.
Some say yes, specifically some in the current administration... But ignoring my glib & pointless attack at a few powerful racists: this tangent of the tangent has very little to do with that the previous posters were saying.
The comparison would only be valid if rounding up the Muslim population has some effect on commercial interests specifically the giving commercial interests in the country doing the rounding up an advantage over those in the other country.
My point is that we shouldn't be copying the tactics of our competitors if we believe and accuse them to be wrong in the first place.
We've been accusing China of "unfair tariffs" when in reality we actually benefit from exploiting their cheap labor and sell them back the same iPhone they assembled for something like 10x the markup. Trying to say this is a reactionary tariff is disingenuous, when the trade balance has been in this state for decades, and the only real reason we're starting to ban their tech exports is because it's getting dangerously competitive with our own. It's shaking our foundational beliefs that our system is destined to win, and now we're resorting to the tactics of our rivals in a moment of insecurity.
Except that the comment at the head of the thread was the one arguing that two wrongs make a right - that if the US does this, then all of a sudden China could start doing the same thing to US companies. The reply is just pointing out that this ignores the fact China already does this, on much vaster scales, and has done since forever. (Given that China is about the closest thing we have to a second superpower, this fits interestingly with your argument.)
Geopolitics is a little more complicated than phrases we tell children.
At the core of it, the kind of protectionism China has engaged in is defecting in a prisoner's dilemma. If you play always cooperate against a defectbot, you're going to lose eventually, even if you start very far ahead.
The correlation of free trade with civil liberties strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. I can’t imagine the average citizen thinks of “free trade vs. protectionism” in moral terms.
It's rather surprising that US policies are blamed for the current standoff instead of China's Great Firewall, which has been getting stronger by each year due to lack of a stronger opposition.
Because it's false? Companies are banned in China for not following Chinese laws or directives. Like... how they report on Tiananmen Square, for example.
When you learn a bit more about geopolitics, you realize that there's more to these things than initially appears. Tiananmen Square was pretty bad. But when you look at the utter collapse of Russia after it tried to Westernize, and the poor shape of America because of her own economic policies, someone not living in the Anglo/American news bubble would really have to wonder.
To that end, companies that have an easier time skirting around the dirty politics – like Tesla, Ford, and GM – have been able to have successful and profitable operations in China. As the parent points out, there's a pandora's box that's being opened. And if you are led to believe that it's a normal comment, it's the same nationalistic stuff you've being trained to fall in line with.
> Companies are banned in China for not following Chinese laws or directives.
Sure, but by that same argument, this executive order bans ByteDance/Tencent under American laws and directives (specifically, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act).
Obviously not the case - this is an out-right ban. There has been no evidence of TikTok violating any laws, and furthermore, no new laws have been issued to which TikTok could adhere to avoid a ban.
Companies operating in China can adhere to Chinese law to operate in the country, but the Trump administration hasn't even issued any laws.
The IEEPA is literally a law. (Also, PRC laws are vague/broad and often applied arbitrarily, just look at the new Hong Kong security law. Not saying this isn't true for US laws, but it's disingenuous to point at the laws when the effects and implementation of those policies matter more.)
It is well known China has stolen IP from western companies and strong armed them into partnership agreements if they wanted to operate in China, as well as using illegitimate anti-monopoly crackdowns to handicap them.
Even assuming they revoked the ban, I also don't see how it's particularly relevant to the point I was making; they still banned the entire franchise for months because he wrote a single message on Twitter. Censorship isn't somehow acceptable if it only lasts ~8 months. It's perhaps the definition of arbitrarily abused power.
> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ?
Yes? Are you unaware that China has been doing exactly this for many, many years?
Just as two examples, AWS was forced by China to sell off its Chinese operations to a Chinese company because of arbitrary national security reasons. Blizzard Entertainment was forced by China to go through a Chinese intermediary who controls and publishes all Blizzard games in China.
The Chinese government sets their (extremely authoritarian) rules on censorship for companies to legally operate in China but the rules apply to everyone equally.
Chinese companies of course have to comply, but foreign companies have the choice to comply or not. Google chose to comply initially but decided to pull out later on. Microsoft/Apple choose to comply and are still operating in significant ways in China.
In contrast, US is proposing to ban TikTok, Huawei, DJI without clear rules: the reason to ban these companies is that they are Chinese companies. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing.
China also doesn't have the monopolistic power in tech that the US does: forbidding Google to operate in China it's not the same as forcing app stores to de-list certain apps globally.
It's even more absurd to force ByteDance to sell their US business to a US company. If the US feels justified that this could be done on "national security" ground, why shouldn't EU do the same to US tech companies?
I do hope that US citizens see that for much of the world, US is no longer the champion of free market, promoter of free-speech or guardian of world-order. All that matters is if these values benefit US economically or politically.
The US lost it when Japan was economically sanctioned for its competitive auto/electronic sector in 1980s. China is taking the same heat today and India would be the next target if India were to want to play its role on the international stage. The best outcome for the world would be to have multiple strong economies globally that keep each other in check; rather than one country having monopolistic power over all globally significant online forums.
In the AWS case, the law that AWS was breaking was that they were operating telecom equipment while not being a Chinese company. So I think there’s more symmetry there (though one could argue that there’s at least a uniformly enforceable rule on all foreign companies, unlike the ByteDance case).
Yes, the closest example would be Huawai in this case but the lack of uniformly enforced rules is deafening.
If US were to decide that all telecom equipment used in the US must be produced by domestic companies then that's fair enough.
Going after one specific privately owned company, influencing ally states' purchase decision, banning foreign companies globally from supplying chips is outright bullying and sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.
> ...sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.
Isn't that exactly what the Chinese laws do? Everything I've read seems to say that they prevent foreign companies from being able to fairly compete against local Chinese. companies.
When Google entered the Chinese search market it was competing fairly with local players: both Baidu and Google have to accept the (authoritarian) rule that they need to censor their search if they want to legally operate in China.
You could argue if the rule itself is good (I think it's not), but the point is that there are clearly stated rules that Google could choose to comply with or not.
Which "rule" did TikTok, Huawai, Wechat violate other than the fact that they are born Chinese companies?
The US could also decide that all social networks that operate in the US must be owned by American companies and subject to congressional inquiries. That would be fair enough, though that's an even more extreme version than what the Chinese government has been demanding.
I think it's important to clear up why Google left China. Google was complying with Chinese rules. They left China because of a state-sponsored attack on Google[1]. Trying to play the high road with CCP, while leaving this out, is whitewashing American tech history in the state.
Given that the Chinese state elected to hack an American firm that was operating in it's borders, you could make any sort of excuse to prevent Chinese firms from owning American infrastructure for any sort of national security reasons. TikTok doesn't have to break any rules. If I see my roommate get mauled by a tiger, that doesn't mean I have to sit around and wait to get mauled before I take an action.
FWIW AWS basically skirted this by having the chinese companies they contract with be the official "seller of record"/"operator"/"owner" but the regions are de-facto operated by western AWS engineering teams under a complicated contracting scheme.
But the big difference is that Amazon still controls aws in China, the product, the brand, the IP. And aws is developed employees in Seattle. It's just operated by the Chinese company. The Chinese company deal with servers, deployment, accesses to the servers and stuff. Amazon also get a significant share of revenue from that market. That is totally different from US gov forcing Bytedance to sell tiktok. Bytedance will no longer own tiktok. It's will have 0 shares. Zero control and no revenue sharing. Technically Microsoft can do whatever they want with tiktok in the future.
No, but they certainly could if it suited their interests. What I find interesting in this thread is this assumption of both proportionality and rationality from the other party. China isn't, and hasn't, followed the same rules as the rest of the West. Why would we expect them to now? Moreover, from a game theoretical perspective it seems suicidal to act like they will, and then do nothing but complain about them "not following the rules".
China says if you want to set up a factory in China you need to transfer IP. They aren't forcing western companies to invest. Most companies invested voluntarily. And this was seen as mostly OK when the rivalry wasn't as heated.
Tolerated by whom? Those companies aren't owned by the public, or by the US government. The owners/executives of those companies tolerated the practice, because they believed that they could still be profitable and that the risk was acceptable. And profit they did. Do you think they care one bit about ideology?
I find it rather strange that so many people throw around the "tolerate in order for China for open up" rhetoric, as if companies invest in China for ideological reasons. Ironically, by forcing those western companies to not do business with China, you are infringing on those companies' freedom to choose for themselves, and violating liberal values.
Furthermore, as someone who came from China, that "China did not open up" is completely false. In the past 30 years, China opened up immensely. In the 70s, Chinese could not choose what to wear, could not choose to travel abroad, people could randomly be caught on suspicion of colluding with "the enemy". All of that has changed. Even the latter: the practice of being "reported by your neighbor for suspicious activities" no longer happens, the Cultural Revolution madness is over. Heck, even "not allowed to criticize the government" is no longer true: there are official channels for publishing constructive criticism (emphasis on constructive), and government officials post official replies in the public, and the criticism is listened to without getting you into trouble (the caveat being that you are not allowed to instigate mass protests, or call for overthrow of the government). Sure, it's not equivalent to western democracies, but it did change for the better even if there's still room for improvement. But for some reason, many western people completely ignore this fact and buy into the rhetoric that "China did not open up". It's not even a small fact, it's a huge boulder staring in your face, and people don't see it.
China enacted a new foriegn investment law. It no longer require joint venture, IP transfers. Tesla is able to use this law to built an wholly owned subsidiary and factory in China. A lot of big autos in China are now buying back their ownership in joint venture, previously they were 50% 50%. BMW now fully owns all their operations in China. Also for 50% 50% joint venture, it actually has benefits for foreign companies because it reduced their capital expenditure and split the risks when Chinese market was not a known factor during the early 2000s. For IP transfers, they would most likely be evaluated against the risk and rewards. It's basically buying market access with IP. Companies don't transfers their best IP, but an outdated version. But for Chinese at that time it's still valuable.
What does this "open up" actually mean? A bunch of American companies have set up shop in China, which was not possible 50 years ago. Now it's common for huge entertainment properties like blockbuster movies and the NBA to get a massive share of revenue from China. Video game consoles are now legal. And of course, China is now essential in the production of most American products.
Open up means become a modern democratic state with respect for human rights, or at the very least, be on the road to one. The opposite has happened and the pundits from the 90s look pretty silly right about now.
This is absolutely fair whataboutism because it shows the US's first priority has consistently been commerce over human rights. You couldd still say the US values "free people" a little bit, but values "free markets" more, and thus we get Deng Xiaoping > Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The irony of these trite whataboutist responses is that China would be in such a better position as global leader if it were open or democratic. Unfortunately for the Chinese people, the Party is more interested in maintaining personal power than charting a good path for humanity.
> China would be in such a better position as global leader if it were open or democratic.
Certainly. And the CCP hinders that. But the point of my above comment is to illustrate that it's an open question whether China would be 'allowed' to be open and democratic.
I don't believe the West is actually concerned about CCP's human rights violations. They're simply concerned about China's rise as an economic and military power, we would not support the Saudi regime if human rights was a concern.
One of the major reasons the CCP got a foothold in China was because there was a sense that for over a century China was subservient to Western powers.
The CCP was fine as far as the west was concerned as long as it was primarily a dumb factory for us. But now they have ambitions to go beyond that.
I think that's the crux of the animosity towards China today, not human rights violations, as gross as they are.
I could imagine China being somewhat of an EU and democratic and as long as they buy enough western products, be left alone. But if they actually wanted a truly independent foreign policy for example, that would not fly. See the Iran Deal for how dependent EU foreign policy is on the U.S. one.
P.S. That does not mean the CCP is good. It's not. But pretending that western leaders actually care about its human rights abuses is silly.
I think this viewpoint is pretty one-dimensional and oversimplifies the complexity of geopolitics. The US is like any other country in that faces a constant struggle between its idealistic values and the realities of the world. To say that “the West doesn’t care about the human rights violations” is absurd, as if you could paint nearly a billion people (Europe plus US) with a single brush. The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd. The world isn’t that simple.
To give you an example: in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse.
The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries. This isn’t because they condone abuses in these countries, but because a long history of failed colonialism and wars has rendered the West extremely hesitant to get involved in any sort of ‘just’ war that isn’t provoked by the state in question (see Iraq and Kuwait for example.)
The contemporary populist rise of American hostility to China is also linked directly to offshoring jobs from the Rust Belt, so again, there are clearly groups of people who have issues with China that aren’t merely “crush the rising competitor.”
In any case I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
> To say that “the West doesn’t care about the human rights violations” is absurd, as if you could paint nearly a billion people (Europe plus US) with a single brush.
It should be pretty clear from the context that I am talking about western governments, not people.
Also, as an European, it doesn't look to me like we have much in terms of independent foreign policy.
> The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd.
One? Please. We support plenty of other dictators all across the world. Or is Egypt's Sisi not a dictator? What about the UAE, Qatar etc.?
What about human rights violations by democratic countries? We don't seem to care much about illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
> in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse
The assumption that the goal at the start was to get rid of a dictator because he was one is fairly well established to not be true. Basically a bunch of neocons who were bitter we didn't dispose Saddam in the FGW wanted to settle scores.
> The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries.
Really, what about the likes of Venezuela/Nicaragua?
> I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
Let's talk about human rights
There is an actual genocide going on in Yemen , and it's perpetuated by a Saudi dictator . The same dictator who dismembered an American journalist in foreign embassy.
Now Americans are selling weapons to the dictator to continue the genocide because human rights are selctive
His comment is in no way whataboutist or trite. It is providing counterexamples to the claim that the goal of US policy is to get countries to "open up", by citing countries that did start opening up until the US stepped in to prevent that from happening.
Forget about pundits, Bill Clinton made this argument: "The American people support this agreement because they know it's good for jobs in America and good for human rights and the development of democracy in China." https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/textonly/library/hot...
Now, did he really believe that? Was he just selling the American people a bad deal? The end result anyway is that this is precisely the argument that was made, and thousands believed it.
Comparing the treatment of black people in the US to the treatment of Uyghurs (ethnic muslim Chinese) is not a realistic comparison at all. Currently Uyghurs in China are forced into prison camps for nothing other then being Uyghurs. They are then forced into labor or in some cases even have their organs harvested. Yes the US did enslave black people but that was stopped long ago and generally Americans agree that was wrong.
>Can you show me such a video of Uyghurs in China.
>I will answer it for you: no you can't.
All your doing is proving that China has no freedom of speech. The reason The reason I cant show you such a video is because of Chinese censorship. Such a video would never be allowed to circulate. The fact that a video of George Floyde being murdered can be shared in the US proves that in US we tolerate speech even when it shows the US in bad light. Also the cops who did this to Floyde are being prosecuted.
Even something as simple as a picture of Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because people compared Pooh, a children's cartoon to China's leader. Imagine the leader of a country having his feelings hurt by a child's cartoon so bad that he bans the cartoon.
a)Allowing US Internet companies to compete fairly instead of using the firewall as an excuse to promote state controlled tech monopolies.
b) Having a fair and transparent judiciary to handle cases of intellectual property violations.
Open up would mean an open fiscal policy, namely allow money to leave the country. Companies and especially individuals can't invest and then pull the money back out of the country very easily.
It might have been seen as OK on the business community, but people in the national security community have been freting over it for a long time. For reasons good and bad those views are now in the ascendancy in the political sphere.
“Intellectual property”. What a joke. Throughout school how many times was I excited by a solution I devised until I realized my same exact approach was already discovered, published, and well known? These problems we are solving first dont entitle is to exclusive right over the solution.
We want to kick down the ladder after we climb it. That’s what this is about.
Out of curiosity, how many American companies have Chinese patents (NOT USA patents) that get don't get relief after suing the violator in a Chinese court.
This thread is about the US govt banning foreign companies for no justifiable reason. China sees the US abandon due process to screw over its companies and...? Somehow that leads to improved international legal norms. It doesn't make any sense.
It makes complete sense, its tit for tat, China can can arbitrarily impose their rules on foreign companies and now US is doing the same.
Either Chinese businesses can lobby the Chinese Govt to make peace with US or the Chinese govt wont listen to them and have a more aggressive stand, only time will tell.
Software is generally harder to pin down than other things when it comes to IP theft, but even so there is still a clear distinction between "stealing" a feature and stealing the actual code that enables that feature. China / Chinese companies have been consistently caught doing the latter. They also do the former but that is not what anyone is complaining about.
The difference between west and CCP is that you follow rule of law, everyone is free until you're proven guilty. If you just replicate what CCP is doing you're admitting that their ideology is superior.
> US tech firms still have a harder time operating in China.
It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
Clearly many companies benefit from outsourcing manufacturing to China. But they don't own the manufacturing process, they're basically using contract labor and supply chains. Software and design has proven harder to outsource or I'm sure that would be gone, too. The point is that our software apps are not freely allowed to exist there. The firewall is a thing, information is tightly controlled, and they can't allow freedom of speech so they typically ban or limit many American applications.
it's a tit for tat. chinese labour market isn't exactly a free market, and its state controlled policies is precisely the reason why the world chose china in the first place
> It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
Labor is fungible, if it wasn't in China it would be somewhere else.
Google, fb, Twitter doesn't comply with internet security law in China, which requires servers in China and content regulation. The same law applies to everyone. If you follow it by the letter, you can operate. Case in point, Apple iCloud, Amazon, Microsoft azure etc. Yes the law itself is highly controversial. I for one would want this law changed. But at least the path for market access is documented. In tiktok case, it didn't break any existing us laws. It has an American office and hires Americans to do security and content monitoring. All data is stored on US soil. It promised to let outside review of data practices and how the algorithm works. There is no clearly spelled out procedure to follow to be allowed operating in the US. I am sure tiktok people are searching in the air for ideas to get themselves allowed to operate. I think thats the difference between fb in China and tiktok in the US.
It's become clear over the past year or so that US policy is essentially to ban Chinese tech companies from the US. ZTE, Huawei, ByteDance, WeChat, and surely more to follow as the election approaches and Trump tries to escalate tensions with China further.
On the other side, American tech companies do massive amounts of business in China.
The relationship is very lopsided, and at some point, China is sure to take action against American tech firms in China.
> A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.
That has been the case since at least the start of colonialism, so something like 200 years now. It depends on what you mean by long term, but that is already a long time. (And it has been sort of non-violent since the de-colonization wars in the 60s).
a) Fair enough. But I reserve some doubts it will be that easy. If it gets to the point that China bans Boeing, I'm convinced many EU companies would also be in the firing line of US sanction regulators and China.
b) Cormac cannot even produce jet engines after 25+ years of state backed R&D.
"China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service."
My point was that they are building a commercial plane (not with Chinese fans yet), as your usage of "yet alone" expressed some kind of dependency or sequence, at least to my non native speaking ears.
Don't they prevent some of our companies from operating there though? And then developed their own competing solutions free from competition. That's not exactly a free market, is it?
Which companies? If you mean Google search, they decided it wasn't worth complying with Chinese laws and left. You may not agree with the specific laws but complying with local laws is a bare minimum requirement for entry into the market of every country. Google even made a second attempt to reenter China, but shut down due to criticism from employees and the US government.
All Google services are banned, IIRC. And the legality of anticompetitive practice is hardly a justification. This executive order is, after all, entirely legal.
Good examples. AirBnB operated fine in China even has a China BU last time I checked. Uber sold it's operation in China to local competitors as they were losing any way.
No AirBNB was/is getting CRUSHEd in china because the monopoly power of the companies already present. You have to understand that competition in China is like a childrens playground, with the CCP being the parents.
They will choose the winners and losers, but they will do so by balancing their own metrics, which has China's economic power as no.1 priority.
Only know is Airbnb doing more OK, after moving servers to china, making local joint ventures, changing their name to a chinese one etc. etc.
AirBnB would still get crushed like most other American companies when they face strong local competitors even if they have full support from CCP. These companies are usually terrible at localization and what works in America won't just work in China. Doesn't mean it's not possible for them to succeed, LinkedIn for example, did fairly well in China so far.
AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"
Neither of which are banned in China. It isn't allowed to offer cab services with a privately owned car in China, but this is also true in most of the EU.
When the laws are vague and broad and applied arbitrarily, they are basically the same as American laws like the IEEPA which give Trump the power to ban those companies. By the same argument, you may not agree with IEEPA but it exists and ByteDance and Tencent have to deal with it. It is not a good argument though.
"Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks conducted by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with ties to the People's Liberation Army.[2] First publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post,[1] the attacks began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009.[3]
The attack was aimed at dozens of other organizations, of which Adobe Systems,[4] Akamai Technologies,[5] Juniper Networks[6] and Rackspace[7] have publicly confirmed that they were targeted. According to media reports, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley,[8] Dow Chemical,[9] and BlackBerry [10] were also among the targets."
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I'd prefer we reference CCP instead of China to differentiate the Chinese people from their tyrannical rulers.
The laws in America not outright making it illegal for tyrannical organizations who operate concentrate camps and partake in genocide (Uighurs) to have access to our democratic societies and benefit economically doesn't mean it's not something you should stand for - and where the laws likely should exist for that.
Likewise, the CCP would likely just takeover Tesla's operations - maybe paying them, maybe not. The difference in the US, currently at least, is TikTok has options: 1) they don't sell and the ban comes, they don't receive any $x billions compensation, or 2) they understand a ban is likely in the US (and growing other democratic nations) and they make the smarter economic decision of selling for $x billions - maybe at fire sale pricing, however there are many competitors who could still compete and be capable of taking over operations, so perhaps not as low as otherwise it could be.
We're not hurtling towards the abyss, that's fear mongering; you may be right that SV startups may have to divest their China based investors, however that may or may not hurt them - and that would be the result of countering external costs to supporting and allowing CCP that we haven't been adequately accounting for for decades.
This is a strategic political-economic pressure decision to put pressure onto the CCP - notice that we're paying attention and won't stand for the level of abuse and tyrannical behaviours of the that we're becoming more and more aware of.
Economic pressure and preventing access to democratic societies for economic gain IS the graceful way to go about this, rather than allow CCP to gain more reach, access for propaganda for intelligence gathering and manipulation, to then spoil politicians further and become more entrenched in our societies economically and via investments in the most popular apps, etc.
And finally, the CCP isn't suicidal - their $500 billion stimulus you reference was for their own survival as well; they also wouldn't want this system they've been creating getting its fingers strongly into the rest of the world economy (which they depend on to maintain) to collapse, the collapse of which would mean things would shift greatly and more likely away from their own benefit.
This is nothing new; it's geopolitics. The big boys have been doing this since the dawn of time.
Think of it like a playground: Everyone generally gets along, but the big kids can and sometimes do monopolize things they think are important at the time. The smaller kids make way for the bigger kids, and every now and then there's a fight between the bigger kids when they disagree strongly enough. They exchange words, jostle and block each other, or maybe it even comes to blows, and then things return to the status-quo for awhile.
That's how geopolitics work, except that it's usually a LOT more subtle or at least hidden from the public eye. Trump isn't a member of the political elite and is completely lacking in tact, so it's a lot harder to keep an appearance of calmness when he's in the room. Expect a much cleaner appearance of normalcy once he's out of office.
Anytime you do business with China your essentially doing business with the CCP.
We would all like China to be a positive part of the global community but the fact of the matter is you can't ignore their overall policy. A possible genocide against the ethnic Uighurs, aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, normalization of censorship and suppression, treatment of Hong Kong & Taiwan: all of which are a complete contrast of Western values.
Could China force Tesla to sell Chinese operations? Absolutely. I don't think any one would be surprised. Companies that enter the Chinese market (if they can in the first place) are subjected to getting a smaller piece of the pie from the start.
Facebook has relentlessly tried to tap the Chinese market but are blocked by the CCP. So why does TikTok get a free pass to the American market? Why does __any__ Chinese company get a pass?
I think we need to continuously evaluate our relationship with China.
WAL-MART, Starbuck, Ford, General Motors, GE, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, UnitedHealth, HP, IBM, JPMorgan, Pepsi, CocaCola... all these companies are easy targets of China. But the Chinese government is not likely to make any move unless really cornered.
China has been doing this for a very long time to US companies. I'm not sure what pandora's box is being opened here. They just didn't selectively to two companies, they do it to all of them (other than Tesla who was the exception to the rule).
EU gave $200+ billion, plus each country did their own thing.
Ask FB or Google about their Chinese websites. How are they doing? This should have been done long time ago, tit for tat.
As for the rest, I doubt China can resort to stupid stuff. US and EU are not happy with them for a lot of things, including Covid, and China desperately needs them. China allowed manufacturing not to help us, but to gain taxes, employment and to steel IP.
Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China has some pretty serious means available to it for escalation. China can ban Boeing from China forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat.
The whole thing is pretty stupid overall. Most people don't realize that during the 2008 crisis it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. China and the US are interdependent and hold up the global system upon which global growth depends. If China slows down as a result of all this that reduces global growth. Pushing China to the wall can make them take extreme steps like undercut the entire dollar based financial order leading to mass instability. The US might come out victorious anyway but its not worth the risks. Not to mention a war which if it breaks out could lead to WW3.
Previous attempts to contain China were much more tactful with things like the TPP and the Iran deal. Right now the world is hurtling towards the abyss and most people here don't even realise it.
A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.