As much as I agree and being from a "third world" country myself, I can still remember China banning Facebook and Google in 2009/2010. Everyone has had to bend over backwards to gain access to the Chinese market while giving them free reign to the rest of the world.
No they didn't, both Facebook and Google decided to quit themselves. Remember Dragonfly? Google just tried to get back into China THIS YEAR and was blocked by the US government. It's the US that's closing access to China not the other way around.
Wrong, Facebook was blocked in China following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots because Facebook refused to release information about Xinjiang independence activists.
In March 2009, China blocked access to Google's YouTube due to footage showing Chinese security forces beating Tibetans. Access to other Google online services was denied to users arbitrarily.
The search engine remained operational under the condition that the government could filter the search results. In January 2010, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely.
Also, the government didn't "block" Dragonfly. Google terminated the project after its own employees protested it and politicians criticized it.
(All the above from Wikipedia either as direct quotes or paraphrased for brevity.)
The companies may have been unblocked if they'd handed over information potentially leading to death of the protestors AND allowed the Chinese state to continue hacking their systems.
If we're not being disingenuous, that's like telling your coworker: "If you come into work today, I'll kill this bystander and rob your house," and then saying: "Hmm, I guess they decided by themselves to not to come into work today."
Luckily we don't live in a cyberpunk world where corporations are above the state. TikTok is obedient to the state and is still getting banned, the US has no excuses.
How facile to compare the situations of companies "when they follow [China's] rules" and "when they obey US laws" as if they are equivalent.
America is being arbitrary, capricious, and unfair, in contradiction to the neutral and generally applicable law in America. But China's legal system has been arbitrary and capricious for decades, and is rotten to the core, consistently elevating the whims of the ruling party over rights and due process.
To use nonsense numbers: the US is designed to be 0% arbitrary but is being 20% arbitrary here. China is designed to be 90% arbitrary all the time. Clearly means China can keep out all the firms and be virtuous, but when the US keeps out any firms for any reason they're unfair and wicked!
The problem with the Chinese government/legal system is well known for long and most Chinese people wish it can improve over time.
It is weird to see that some people in the US wants to celebrate and justify the deterioration of their designed-to-be-perfect system.
It would be hypocrisy if China wasn’t a heavily planned market economy that they are in fact claiming to be.
You have two systems, and one of them is having doubts about the efficacy of its own system.
In theory at least, China’s planning either results in less competitive alternatives, or eventually it would have to open up its economy (when the playground is more fair) to foster its own innovation. If it never allows competition then innovation would languish.
If we take action in contradiction to this natural series of economic events, we would be hypocrites as we’d be losing faith in our core economic beliefs.
