>corporations must not be the ones deciding which laws are applicable where.
This is literally restating this:
>the lack of political freedom in China is tolerable because that's just how Chinese culture is
Who decides when and where it is okay to disobey laws that restrict freedom/privacy? If not the modern day multi-nation states of corporations, who? Serfs?
> You enter someone's country and you ought to obey the local laws there.
China doesn’t have rule of law, they never had a law about censorship, at least not back when google left. It was basically the party telling Google that they had to police themselves and not to talk about what they told them in public, because transparency is a horrible thing in China.
It’s like a top secret law that no one is allowed to know about but everyone must follow.
Google leaving China the first place was about bad governance and corruption, not censorship.
> China is a huge country, and excluding a billion people from your company just because their government does questionable things sounds like a pretty bad idea.
People have to do what the state they live in and belong to orders them to do. That's part of the point of having a state. So if you can't trust a state you can't trust its people either.
> you are really concerned about the confidentiality of your data, don't store it unencrypted in some SaaS
I don't think dissolving the company is on the table.
> Chinese authoritarian government doesn't allow American companies to freely operate in China, but they want freedom for the Chinese companies in the West? That's a little hypocritical, don't you think?
Not really, no. Our government operates under our constitution, not China's.
>What’s legal and what’s right are not the same thing[...]and in countries with bad laws (Middle East, China)
What are bad laws, whatever people socialised in the anglosphere deem bad? You don't have a monopoly on ethics, sorry. Companies should behave legally, they're not the extended arm of the respective culture they reside in, because if they are we will constantly pester each other with our respective moral values and that's a recipe for conflict.
The solution is pretty simple. Chinese companies need to stop censoring things in the US, the US needs to stop trying to spread its values beyond her own borders, and we can all do business in peace.
What we don't need is countries with messianic attitudes interfering in each other's affairs, and to give businesses primacy over the law in sovereign nations.
> Chinese companies offer real competition to that. Chinese companies are very good for my political freedom.
I would not totally agree with that statement. In some ways I may be able to speak more freely as a foreigner on Chinese run platforms because China might not care to suppress the same news that American run platforms would try to suppress. I would not agree that they offer political freedom. The CCP does not believe in any level of free speech. For an example see the recent news. Not only do they want to suppress it but even outside China they try to erase that history.
> China should not be able to control society outside of its own walls, yet they have blatantly influenced the behavior of our biggest mass media companies for years.
It’s companies that want access to China that are making these choices. It’s why foreign companies are afraid to deal with Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran.
> I think the focus on China with respect to privacy is misplaced. This is a problem with many tech companies now.
Yes and no.
Yes, it is a problem with many tech companies, I agree.
But the way China does this is something completely different. Tech companies do this for their profit. China as a country exploits every single avenue to steal information and protect their position.
> Every multinational business has to deal with laws in multiple countries that may be incompatible with others.
Indeed, but why should Western countries allow Chinese companies access to our markets when China offers absolutely zero reciprocity?
It's one thing to operate in an economic/political sphere that shares a reasonable set of common political and economic values, and deal with the relatively tiny differences (tax codes, data protection laws, content moderation, advertising restrictions, ...). Hell even with larger differences (EU GDPR vs US laissez-faire), US megacorps can still freely operate in Europe.
In contrast, it's a completely different thing to operate in China - either you are outright banned (Meta, Twitter, Google, ...) or you have to have a corporate entity where the foreign party must be below 50% ownership, and in some cases you have to install a parallel governance structure of the CCP [1].
> A company complying with the laws of the country it does business in seems fairly uncontroversial to me, even if you may not agree with those laws.
Stopping your analysis at legality/illegality is morally bankrupt. Local laws can be explicit tools of oppression and malice, and I would say its very controversial for western companies to follow such laws in authoritarian countries like China.
For an utterly obvious example of why this is true: look at Nazi Germany. Everything it did was in compliance with its local laws, but now many of its actions are universally considered crimes against humanity. Foreign companies and individuals that collaborated with it on those crimes are not excused by those laws.
> Do you want your companies to be extensions of US foreign policy?
I want them to be extensions of some basic liberal values, not agents of profit uber alles. For instance, I applaud European pharmaceutical companies for refusing to sell the anesthetics used for lethal injection to the US states that use them for executions.
> As with every Chinese company, the problem isn't that they're Chinese. It's that as a Chinese company, they exist only with the blessing of the CCP.
This, 100%.
The Chinese government's word is LAW. Just look at how many American tech companies have either a) been kicked out of China for refusing to hand over data to the CCP or given them backdoors or b) started censoring their services to stay in compliance and be allowed to stay in business there.
If the Chinese government wants something from a Chinese business, one of two things happens: 1) they get it (whether you find out about it or not) or 2) the business ceases to exist.
> Permanent removal from China would probably be worse for freedom in China over 20 years,
Huh?
> No company should be expected to back or foment a revolution somewhere, from my perspective they're looking out for their own beet interest and the best interest of their customers.
Profit is not an adequate moral compass. I deeply disagree that by forming a corporation, individuals who would otherwise have ethical obligations are somehow no longer obligated to behave ethically. You're literally claiming that it's okay to enable the violation of human rights for profit.
> What's to stop the companies from claiming they just happen to want to remove the speech of their own volition?
The fact that they would have no choice if they were subject to China's jurisdiction. You can't choose to do something you're being forced to do, therefore if you do it, it wasn't your choice.
> That is a rather authoritarian view of the law & power of governments that you have there.
No, not at all. Since Valve is not a democratic organization its employees aren't free to begin with. Restricting its owners' "freedom" to tell their employees what to do is hardly authoritarian – freedom is about deciding what you do yourself.
> A company would not, for example, be able to opt-out of assisting China with their censorship initiatives, or stop business with them all together if there was no other choice.
>There is precedence of American companies not allowed to operate in China.
Not true. They can operate, they just need to obey the law. Same way other companies need to obey American laws to operate in US, eg enforcing copyright or providing Lawful Interception mechanisms.
> China does not prevent american businesses to do business in China as long as they follow the law.
You fail to mention that the law requires 51% ownership by a Chinese company and forced IP transfer.
You also fail to mention that there are many industries in which foreign company are completely prohibited.
And the Chinese version of “following the law” includes whatever the party arbitrarily decides you should do. Including things like forcing companies to remove any mention of Taiwan from material completely outside of China.
> Information on how this actually works is scarce since relative to the US there is much weaker rule of law/discovery, and fewer independent journalists, considering how tightly China controls and polices which journalists are allowed in and what they write about.
I think this has more to do with our ignorance of how their system works than China having a truly ruleless society. Even the Mafia has rules governing their behavior despite not being a democratic organization.
> "Companies in China, including foreign firms, are required by law to establish a party organization, a rule that had long been regarded by many executives as more symbolic than anything to worry about."
I think after the Snowden leaks we’ve been shown to have similar opaque government compelling private company scenarios. There are also the opaque national security letters. After 9/11 we traded a lot of our freedom for security in much the same way “communist” regimes like China operate. At this point we practice most of the same things, which is probably why we know that China does what we do (perhaps even more).
> Chinese companies can operate in America as long as they follow American laws, likewise American companies can operate in China as long as they follow Chinese laws.
Are you sure? What law does Youtube and Twitter need to follow to be allowed to operate in China?
> The solution is obviously not to make America less free
I don't view banning TikTok and WeChat as making America less free. We can just make our own. And we're only doing this to China and it's deserved.
> If the American government were concerned about their citizens privacy they would have passed stricter privacy regulations and only then banned companies that didn't comply.
Well, that's the wrong phrasing. If American citizens were concerned they would make their government pass stricter privacy regulations. But I don't believe that this is mutually exclusive to also banning Chinese companies due to other reasons as highlighted above.
This is literally restating this:
>the lack of political freedom in China is tolerable because that's just how Chinese culture is
Who decides when and where it is okay to disobey laws that restrict freedom/privacy? If not the modern day multi-nation states of corporations, who? Serfs?
reply