> But Uber is not really blocked in China at all. They worked really actively with their government and even throw in a DC in China.
Uber is not blocked, for now. That can change in a whim. The Chinese government can simply create regulations that apply to them that do not apply to their local competitors. This has happened many times before in the past....
>Unlike the fact that China still cannot make a smart phone as good as iPhone, or cannot make their own OS like windows, that's they Apple and MS thrived.
While the Chinese did not design the iPhone to say that they "cannot make a smart phone as good" is completely false. For one, the iPhone is largely manufactured in China and has been for a few generations now. Second, some of the best iphone competitors / android devices are being made by Chinese companies.
>But every major US tech company is banned or blocked from competing in China, isn’t it?
Nope, Microsoft operates in China, so does IBM, Uber did before the Chinese branch was acquired by Didi (they weren't banned, just outcompeted).
China is funnily enough even facebook's second largest market by revenue (about 5 billion) from Chinese advertisers.
Google probably could operate in China and I guess doesn't because it fears American backlash.
Doing business in China is arguably more complicated for American tech firms than the other way around, but American companies are most definitely not blanked banned or anything.
> That was a surprise to me as I thought Android phones completely dominated the Chinese market.
Likely that Android does dominate the Chinese market like the rest of the world.
I think a better way to view it is to segment the mobile device market into 3: high, middle and low end; Apple dominates the high-end market segment. iPhones are still largely considered a status symbol in China.
> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram et al have been blocked for years in China.
The Chinese government did not decide this on a whim, these companies are not willing to comply with Chinese rules within China. Whatever we might think of these rules the bottom line is that these companies are not in China because they have decided not to be. And when they try to move in, like Google did, their very employees argue against it.
China is Apple's largest market, iirc, they are doing very well there. For smartphones their market share is 3 times their market share in India. Still, a lot of Chinese still cannot afford iPhones and China has many domestic manufacturers: Actual competition is fierce, this has nothing to do with politics.
The argument that the US are retaliating against China blocking the FAANG is largely for the show but not reality.
> and it seems quite at odds with the resistance to the FBI getting a screenlock bypass to that iPhone 5 a while back
It's not at odds at all. The US isn't going to arbitrarily blockade Apple's market access over the screenlock conflict. At worst you go to court and battle the US Government over that, with a decent chance of prevailing. China will and can do anything it likes, including entirely removing your market access, if you injure their fragile national self-esteem. They're very sensitive about perceived slights, whether due to their history or the inherent fragility of authoritarian regimes, or both. I'm not making a joke about their over-sensitivity, it's a real thing that all companies must deal with there.
Apple basically told the US Government point blank: no; on something important to the Feds. What happened to Apple in consequence? Nothing. Try that with China. They'd probably love an excuse to kick Apple out, even if briefly, to bolster their domestic alternatives (doing it briefly is ideal, because it might make it nearly impossible for Apple to recover lost market share, and then China gets to pretend they're still open to Apple's products after the damage is done).
> Why even list Chinese vendors? Those would never happen in a western market.
Because the Western vendors are banned in China, and Apple sells a lot of iPhones in China.
And even in a Western market, you might have Chinese immigrants choosing the Chinese vendor. That's probably not enough to justify the integration in and of itself, but if you already have to do it for the Chinese market, why not offer it in the West too?
> In China, you will be using Chinese government approved services.
First of all, this is only about app stores. When it comes to “services” in general, people in China already do mostly use government approved ones; the Great Firewall makes sure of that.
Today, you use Apple’s App Store, but Apple blocks whatever apps the Chinese government tells them to. Is that really such a great situation? Under a sideloading model, at least you’d have the technical ability to opt out of whatever app store anyone told you to use.
As for legal ability, who knows, but any legal restrictions on where you can get apps from would be hard to enforce. And why would phones be any different from desktops, where such restrictions don’t currently exist?
> I was responding to OP's statement 'nobody else is going to come in and take those customers except Chinese companies'
But you haven't refuted that statement. You merely pointed out there is a tiny amount of "western" companies operating in China, with no numbers on the ratio of foreign to local operations. Which would be the real way to refute that point.
There are foreign brands sniffing around the edges. But mostly, Chinese spend their money IN china. The car companies are a good counter example, but that's mainly because China didn't have the Car manufacturing expertise in house, I believe this is changing. McDonalds and KFC are a joke in China for every one of them you see, there will be at least 10 chinese fast food competitors with more customers. (Turns out Chinese have a preference for Chinese food - Crazy huh?)
iPhone still only hold about a 30% market share. I think that'll change too, as Huawei, and Xiaomi have become significantly more competitive and are significantly cheaper.
Sure. Though, the footing is so unequal that it effectively prevents US companies from gaining a foothold. Maybe that is a little broad but it certainly leans towards the rule vs the exception.
>And the laws for them are no different than they are for Chinese companies.
Before or after they start operating? How difficult is that compared to entering the US or European market?
>Apple and Microsoft are doing absolutely fine in China. Apple's mobile market share there is bigger than it is in Europe. So yes, they already _are_ allowed to gain a comparable market share.
The Government of China is literally trying to stop Apple and Microsoft's dominance as we speak.
They're making some BS "CCP compliant" version that _only_ allows you to do job searching but it is certainly not LinkedIn as we know it.
Sure. On paper, once you jump through the regulatory hoops you're allowed to exist there... but the difference between the environments (and the bias foreign companies endure) is such that I stand by my original comment.
>Isn't Apple ecosystem basically US/European WeChat?
If you could only perform all your life necessities by using a single app from Apple, like taxis/medical records/paying for things/transit access/government stuff/etc., then sure. But for now, there isn't anything like this. In fact, it would not come to fruition at any point in this current timeline imo, given that for each one of those things, Apple has competitors who have offerings just as good or better for each of those categories.
Also, I heavily doubt that US would ever subject itself to every single aspect of people's lives having to go through a single private entity with no alternatives available.
I think another part of the reason it happened in China (aside from obvious ones that people already mentioned, like WeChat being de-facto pretty much an extension of CCP) is the fact that before WeChat there was nothing. So WeChat came to an empty field and filled all that vacuum. In 2020, there is no such vacuum in the US/Europe. For each of the tasks one would use their smartphone for, there are multiple competent competing entries.
China is mostly what I was referring to, honestly. An iOS device that can run five secure-messaging apps instead of ten is still better than an Android device that's been potentially wiretapped during last-mile delivery to the customer.
(This is the same reason that contracts from Western governments propped up RIM for a while, before Apple became a viable replacement for them. A US government official could trust a Blackberry they acquired in China, far more than they could trust a regular Chinese cellphone.)
> More to the point, companies are not nations or governments. Having agendas for countries is not their place.
Companies (at least S-corps) don't have agendas per se; but their employees, as citizens of countries, certainly do. When everybody behind the design of an iPhone lives in the US, you'd better believe that the iPhone is being designed to put forward an implicit "agenda" carried by the cultural beliefs of citizens of the US, whether Apple-as-a-profit-motivated-corporation likes it or not. (You know how there's a recent trend in the US with corporations adopting social-justice messaging in their community guidelines? Think about how that kind of support develops in a corporation, and then replace "social justice" with "foreign policy.")
> 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.
> Why does traveling in the US and the US knowing things about you affect you?
Because I can be detained by a country (or denied entry) much more easily when I am in the country than when I am not.
> Not by Chinese companies though. Individual parts are made there, but they are designed by non-Chinese companies and the manufacturing process is overseen by these companies.
I don't believe that "Chinese company" automatically equals "crap". Xiaomi makes some of the best products I've ever used (and they definitely have the best quality to price ratio of anyone), my Huawei phone is amazing, everything I bought from Ali has been good, etc.
> Last time I checked, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (not to mention Apple products and Google) were used outside the US as well. I don't think anyone in Europe uses a Chinese Facebook clone or Twitter clone.
The western world uses those products. I would be surprised if nobody outside China uses them. Maybe they don't, I don't know the WeChat penetration numbers for countries outside China...
> but I have a hard time believing that foreign tech investments in China really pay off.
If it didn't pay off, apple wouldn't be the most valuable company in the world.
> The Chinese strategy seems to be to woo big foreign companies, build a critical mass of local users who want the product, ban or otherwise limit the foreign company's influence in China
What else do you expect them to do? Cede their entire market to foreigners? Every country did the same thing. The europeans did it. We did it in the US. The japanese and the south koreans. It's really common sense.
> If Google accomplishes anything worthwhile at this research center, won't China just shut it down and re-employ those researchers at a domestic company?
If they did, why would google invest in china? It's been 40 years. If investing in china wasn't lucrative, it would have ended a long time ago.
> Why do high-tech companies even continue to try to break into China?
The real question is why is it that we get the exact same type of comments in every thread about china?
Go through every china related thread on HN and every single one has the exact same comments. Why?
It's a known fact that Apple cooperates, apparently enough to be satisfactory for the CCP.
Short personal anecdote if you don't believe they vigilantly ban anything they don't like: My mom is Chinese and Buddhist. Her tiny Buddhist organization was recently told they would have to cease operations. All they were doing was meditating and praying together in livestreams. They also had online lessons with Buddhist monks and stuff like that. It's all harmless stuff, and their page had like 5K likes.
You would think something tiny like that might fly under the radar in a country with 1.3B people.
It doesn't.
> It seems like a rationalization to always see ourselves as the "good guys" no matter what. Every empire ever did.
I'm not saying we're always the good guys no matter what. There's enough to criticise in our society. But no matter how much room for improvement we have, you cannot seriously contend that it's even a question whether democracies like ours are superior compared to totalitarian regimes like that of China. That question was answered over and over throughout recent history, and shouldn't ever have been brought to the table in the first place.
> I can see the Chinese rationalizing their bans as defending their sovereignty against Western dominance
That's not a rationalization, that's literally just what they're doing. And we're also doing the same by banning TikTok. But that's not the point, defending your sovereignty isn't inherently bad. The point is that it's only bad if bad regimes do it.
Made in USA is a big stretch when nearly all components are imported from abroad.
Better to say "Few screws inserted in USA"
On why you cannot really make thing outside of China:
The biggest proponents of very purposefully locking manufacturing in China are major American companies...
I heard from multiple first hand accounts if Apple trying really hard to move out of China, and putting a concerted multi-year strategy of moving suppliers to TW, and Vietnam. If they cannot move, who will?
The emphasis on the later is because there is positive precedent of any major company succeeding in moving, and that validates beancounter opinion "If multinational A doesn't move, why should we?"
> The only reason you can install an VPN app is via an .apk file and this is due to the technical design by Android vs. a closed ecosystem like Apple App Store.
Obviously, I understood this, right? This was the entire reason I can make a point I about how Apple decided to go down an immoral technical design with the goal of making more money than can be morally justified, because we know there were common alternative designs.
> Technically speaking, Chinese Android phone companies could just block 3rd-party apk installation anytime they want in the name of security (They already do that by default) and 99% users won't know how to circumvent it.
And yet, they don't.
I guess the big problem I have with your comment (the original one also) is that there is a certain scenario where you think you have a great point, and the idea that the other people arguing here or the article we are reading might not fit your enemy template is I guess so confusing or maybe frustrating that you are willing to just start smashing reality until it fits.
That you are pulling out theoretical futures here to fix your narrative is then telling: that Chinese companies could change something... well, a big part of my point is that they have not already changed something, and we can thereby use that to understand the boundary of what the law in China--not just the written ones but anything unwritten as well--are actually saying.
The reality is that, as far it seems both of us know, the only company with much marketshare--INCLUDING OF THE ONES IN CHINA--that outright block your ability to install VPNs on their phones is Apple. This is because Apple has gone to great lengths to design a system where all data and control over hardware is centrally managed by Apple, which causes problems the world over.
> Strategically, the most morally-reasonable way is to help the people in these countries by actually trying to be present even under severe pressures from the regimes to comply with their demands.
Google didn't even leave China over moral reasons: they did it because China was directly messing with their data centers. It is a move that comes off to me as purely defensive. It thereby isn't at all clear to either myself or many of the other people posting here that Google actually cares to take a stance against China due only to some ethical stance.
But like, you do realize I wasn't applauding such an action, anyway, right? While I am not sure I would be against such, I don't actively think Apple should leave China over their inability to host VPNs... I think they should allow people to install VPNs that they don't host, because apparently that's currently allowed in China and the only reason I see that changing is if Apple sets such a strong precedent that it is even possible or reasonable to control an ecosystem from top to bottom that we lose the practical ability--likely throughout the entire world--to even own general purpose computers anymore.
> And god knows how many malicious apps are in those app stores to eavesdrop users' private information.
As for this whole argument path, you seem to be arguing that people don't deserve freedoms because they are... I guess, dumb? If we don't believe people should have freedoms anyway, maybe we should just accept that authoritarian regimes are a force of good? I mean, the Chinese government is going to make tons of similar arguments about the good they are doing. Could it just be that you are pro-authoritarianism? :(
Regardless, you here claim that the possibility of malware people might accidentally install on these devices is somehow a 100% (a number you use later) guarantee of surveillance but ignore that Apple is just handing their centralized collection of user data to China anyway via stuff like iCloud (which is absolutely "in scope" if "users are dumb and will install malware is"... we can't make decisions based on the idea that elites running tech companies have the job of being smarter than the unwashed masses: down that road likes authoritarianism).
At this point I felt I should maybe dig into your comment history to try to better understand whatever your position here result is, and in the process of digging through a hunger of pro-censorship positions and defenses of Apple ( I came across something fascinating from a mere three months ago: you are against Apple's CSAM work (which I would expect you to be for, given your arguments here, as it is essentially the exact same scenario).
> This part is legit though: governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance. Be it hashes of non-CSAM, or simply pressure NEMEC or other hash providers, or extending its capabilities to all messages or photos on device.
> In my opinion, this is the biggest concern, not the technology. Before, Apple could simply refuse by saying we don't have the capabilities. But now, that excuse is gone. Apple's promise to human review content and only report CSAM is the weakest link.
^ This. This is you making my EXACT ARGUMENT for why having centrally managed software distribution is bad: that once you build such a mechanism, "governments around the world could pressure Apple to add other forms of surveillance" by using that mechanism you didn't have to build, and which all but a totalitarian regime (North Korea) would never force you to have built. "Before, Apple could simply refuse by saying we don't have the capabilities. But now, that excuse is gone. Apple's promise to human review content and only [block scams] is the weakest link."
Here is a talk I have at Mozilla Privacy Labs about centralization and the evils thereof, which attempts to link together a ton of these kinds of thoughts. Maybe it would be helpful to sit back and really consider your positions and whether they are at all consistent :(.
> Look at all the pro China things they have done.
Just because they follow the rules of another nation doesn't make them 'pro China'. Is Apple 'pro-US', 'pro-EU', 'pro-Saudi Arabia', etc? No, Apple is pro-business/pro-money. They are a company selling products and services around the world.
> People committing suicide after being forced to work endlessly.
Isn't that Foxconn, a Taiwanese company?
> Agreeing to the Great Firewall rules to continue doing business in China..
So you think facebook and apple should moderate content but China shouldn't moderate content?
> It is not just China, look at the Nabisco workers
A nice save.
> There is no reason extreme pressure couldn't start to force changes at these companies but mostly we are just glad it isn't us.
Change what? Rather than trying to change individual monopolistic companies, we should allow for more competition so that we can decide where to take our business. We have a problem of monopolies.
> Our whole society has lost all sense of empathy and it is sad.
Everyone has their own version of empathy. And everyone wants to enforce their version of empathy on everyone else. It's a problem humans and human societies have had forever.
China produces almost nothing I want unless you count foreign-designed products that happen to be manufactured there under contract. Maybe steel and rare earth metals?
I've tried their flagship apps too (WeChat, Alipay, Alibaba, AliExpress) and they are just really awful compared to their Western equivalents. Not just in subjective look-and-feel ways either: the AliExpress signup flow was so broken in their iOS app that I had to switch to a web browser to sign up!
That they're useful and popular in China is something that has occurred in spite of their awful tech. More through great business development and exploiting a total lack of entrenched non-tech competition like credit cards, consumer banking, malls, Wal-Mart, etc.
Uber is not blocked, for now. That can change in a whim. The Chinese government can simply create regulations that apply to them that do not apply to their local competitors. This has happened many times before in the past....
>Unlike the fact that China still cannot make a smart phone as good as iPhone, or cannot make their own OS like windows, that's they Apple and MS thrived.
While the Chinese did not design the iPhone to say that they "cannot make a smart phone as good" is completely false. For one, the iPhone is largely manufactured in China and has been for a few generations now. Second, some of the best iphone competitors / android devices are being made by Chinese companies.
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