The difficulty with this kind of retaliation is that it's more obviously only "harming" your own citizens.
When a govt imposes trade tarriffs, it's effectively taxing it's own citizens to disincentivize them from purchasing those goods, steering towards others.
When a govt imposes bans, it's preventing it's own citizens from using a service. Yes there's an economic angle to the supplier of the service, but this isn't a financial transaction where a person would vote with their wallet to use the cheaper alternative. This is the attention economy, people want to use the platforms they enjoy using, because they're all free anyway.
>When a govt imposes trade tarriffs, it's effectively taxing it's own citizens
The Econ 101 way to look at it. In the real world, it also promotes domestic production, creating jobs and often helping "nascent industries", and in many cases ultimately leading to even lower prices over the long term as domestic industry matures. This is how basically every advanced economy industrialized. See the work of South Korean economist, Ha-Joon Chang.
> The difficulty with this kind of retaliation is that it's more obviously only "harming" your own citizens.
Is it? Maybe in the short term (and I'm not even convinced of that) but in the long term?
In the long term, I don't want the US to fund China. Period. You can pick your reasons from a smorgasboard: human rights abuses to basic reciprocal market fairness to government subsidization of companies. We tried engagement--it's time to admit it failed.
TikTok being banned should just be one of the things that occur. Manufacturing should get pulled from China. Anything shipped from the China to the US should have a tariff on it. etc.
The first best time to act should have been before we outsourced everything. The second best time to act is now.
You are attempting to equivocate pointing out the very obvious fact that both countries are oppressive in different ways as “both sides are the same.” Seeing the world in black and white and falling for every jingoistic corporate (security state-serving) media narrative about China is the actual juvenile worldview.
> 1. human rights abuses to 2. basic reciprocal market fairness to government subsidization of companies
1. US has the world's highest incarceration rate, with minority populations extremely overrepresented.
2. The US subsidizes its agricultural products to an extreme degree, but forces poor countries like Mexico to drop subsidies that were integral to its food security and economy.
You say Google is not banned, then try to open google.com through any Chinese ISP, can you get anything but connection timeout? Also check Google's transparency report.
Which Chinese law didn't Google follow? Failure to implement the never public admitted content censorship?
Did Chinese government ever acknowledge it's internet censorship?
While banning TikTok is not fair to me, saying Google isn't banned in China is lying.
That's like saying low end PRC cars are banned in US for not meeting US safety regulations. Bing operated in PRC for years after other platforms were blocked and Google's Project Dragonfly was a thing precisely because there was a legally compliant path for Google to operate in PRC. There's a fuckton of public regulations from ministry of public security, commerce, information tech stretching back 20+ years. There was nothing to acknowledge or admit because it was never opaque just onerous (expensive).
As for the law didn't Google follow, disregarding they pulled out due to moral considerations over Operation Aurora, they got hammered along with twitter and facebook post 2009 minority riots for not adequately censoring/filtering calls for violence that at the time required expensive moderation teams which every PRC platform had invested in to stay compliant. Western platforms not following obeying was as much a moral stance as economic - competitive advantage of not sinking shitton of expensive human resources. That wasn't going to fly.
Wasn't until social media driven violence in west i.e. NZ shooting that western platforms were presured to form comparable levels of moderation - incidentally alsoaround time when FB and Google started initiatives to reenter PRC market. After they build tools to minimize violence in west. If you need a specific law, it's covered under art5 of Computer Information Network and Internet Security Protection and Management Regulations from 97 that disallows inciting terrorism, hatred etc. 101 stuff that that any prescient state would enforce. And it took multiple mass casualty evens for PRC to finally and firmly put foot down on western platforms. Like response was to actual instead of hypothetical (but justified) risk.
Generously western platforms are blocked in PRC but not banned. Or that US efforts to ban tiktok exceeds what even PRC gov would do - force sale - vs setting up very restrictive JV like Oracle proposal. At end of day US free to ban tiktok for whatever reason, but for a freespeech advocate, it will be using methods more draconian than even CCP.
> While banning TikTok is not fair to me, saying Google isn't banned in China is lying.
No. You are lying or you are dense. Google operated in china til 2010 or so. It tried to foment a color revolution in china like google did throughout north africa, middle east, ukraine, etc. So china instituted more stringent laws to reign in google. Google chose to leave china because the laws would prevent them from spying and destabilizing china.
So you could call it "banned" if you like, but it isn't "banning" in the same sense as tiktok being banned.
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