Exactly. My understanding is that ByteDance has tried to maintain some distance with the Chinese government in the past, but this pressure from the US essentially forces it to reverse course.
It's antithetical to the US's purported objective of promoting a more liberalized market economy in China (though I suppose that was never something this administration really cared about).
>It's antithetical to the US's purported objective of promoting a more liberalized market economy in China (though I suppose that was never something this administration really cared about).
You're missing the context behind why that policy was in place. A big part of that was the hope that China would democratize in the process. Clearly that has not happened so it makes sense to pull the plug. No point giving out free concessions to trade partners that aren't willing to reciprocate.
It was never about giving "free concessions." It was about opening up China to foreign investment, so that foreign companies could make returns. It's difficult to overstate just how massively foreign companies profited from trade liberalization with China.
Foreign companies were able to earn large returns in China because China's tariffs went from ~40% to ~3%, restrictions on foreign investment were reduced or eliminated in most sectors, big state-owned enterprises were split up and forced to operate like regular companies that have to earn a profit, IP courts were created, along with many other changes large and small.
The sudden cries that China took advantage of the West are just completely out of touch with reality.
I wouldn't put any amount of trust in their claimed independence from the CCP. After all, that's exactly what a CCP vehicle for foreign intelligence ops would say.
Of course there's plenty of reason to be skeptical, but given that the CCP have taken down ByteDance's apps in the past leads to me to believe that they're less willing to cooperate, whereas companies like Tencent seem fully aligned with the CCP.
Maybe it's a next level play the more hardline authoritarian China becomes the easier it is to rally the domestic population to be anti-Chinese in all matters. Remember when terrorists created sectarian violence in Iraq for the sole purpose of inciting ethnic conflict?
I wouldn't have believed it was possible even 5 years ago in the U.S. but now who knows.
I don't think anyone's arguing that it's not legitimate for a country to ban a company on national security grounds, but that this is stretching the definition of what constitutes a national security threat.
Which companies currently banned in the US would you say are comparable to TikTok in terms of the threat they could potentially pose?
This article set off a number of red flags for me, and by the end I found it very hard to believe that this was done by a group of impartial researchers.
And sure enough, Phillip Thomas, the lead researcher for this study, comes from a 20+ year career with the chemical and nuclear industries. I would take everything in this article with a grain of salt.
I can confirm that the Japanese article does indeed say that the ship went closer to land so that it could connect to Wi-Fi. Not sure how common satellite internet is on ships of this kind.
