I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers and to underestimate the Chinese market. It's almost laughable that people think blocking WhatsApp will make any difference to Chinese people.

eg., the Chinese tech/online market is so huge it can sustain multiple competitors of its own in each sector - ride-hailing, search, shopping, food delivery, maps, chat, mobile payments all have massive players providing their own competition and innovation.

Genuine ground-breaking technological innovation is rare. When it happens, it's not like China won't get it (eg. touchscreens) because it blocked Google. In a lot of ways, because Chinese consumers are so quick to adopt new technology, there's sometimes more low-level innovation/adaptation because companies can rely on new apps/tools getting traction quickly.

Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;)

> eg., the Chinese tech/online market is so huge it can sustain multiple competitors of its own in each sector

Doesn't China have bigger aspirations than just the mainland?

People are missing the bigger point. I'm not talking about the current state of things. This is about the future. Most things are derivatives of other things. It's much harder to create these derivatives without easy access to free flowing data. People are saying, "It's fine, Chinese students just study and work in the West and bring it back to China after a few years." This is extremely inefficient. 1. there's the monetary cost involved compared to a open internet connection2. only a very small portion of the population will have this opportunity compared to potentially millions more with an open internet connection. 3. the amount of time it will take for this data to come back to China is huge compared to the instantaneous sharing you get with an open internet connection

Getting more control isn't free, the price is growth.

2. You seem to assume the bulk of innovation is going to be happening outside China and that blocking consumer access to Western platforms would somehow inhibit a flow of information to China. I'd disagree on both counts. The Chinese government is acting as the word's biggest VC and is also very practised and willing to take on long-term transformation plans at the national level. Shutting down foreign platforms only drives adoption of home-grown ones. In addition, they are explicitly targeting a future position as the world leader in AI. In the West I'd be betting on the MIC over individual privately owned companies to put any kind of dent in that ambition. I think any moment where Apple or Google alone could outspend and outcompete China in tech is gone.

This is probably the economic equivalent of banning say mobile phones or some other large and important sector.

For years the thinking has been that China is liberalizing, and it will eventually open up and that reciprocal sanctions or tariffs will spark unnecessary protectionism and encourage China to reverse direction.

A lot of people now, after 20-30 years of similar behaviour, believe that China was just gaming the system all along and had no plans to liberalize politically or allow fair competition from foreign business. Trump certainly tapped into that (although I think there's some consensus that punitive tariffs still won't be useful).

In the case of an import tariff, it is paid entirely by consumers, and domestic suppliers get a windfall from it, rather than sharing the burden. That's because there are two supply curves in play, domestic and international, and only one demand curve, because consumers generally don't care where the goods come from, and the internal trade of foreign markets is ignored.

2. No single country has a monopoly on innovation. Consequently the sharing of ideas from different locations and cultures is really important for moving forward. You miss out on this benefit when you consciously work to block it. Historically, the last time China was this arrogant about isolation, it didn't turn out too well.

Last Update: I've wasted enough time on this and probably should have put this in my original post.

If you think of sharing data as a resource, China just made it artificially scarce, made it extremely slow, and made it really costly which makes total business sense in the Information Age /s Hopefully our governments won't follow

They are isolating data, but hoarding data is a competitive advantage in a way that isolating knowledge isn't.

Ok they are bottlenecking data... As I've already mentioned this is an extremely inefficient way to share data. Sharing data using physically present word of mouth is a lot more expensive and slower than sharing it instantly via an open internet connection.

"Sharing data using physically present word of mouth is a lot more expensive and slower than sharing it instantly via an open internet connection."

Foreigners can set up businesses - see for example, the WFOE [0].

There are restrictions however for certain fields and business activities (infrastructure being one), so while foreigners can't just set up any company, they certainly can set up some companies if they like.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign-Owned_Enterpris...

The data is free flowing enough within China though - that's the bigger point ;)

It's not as if you turn off the access to Western information* and suddenly you've got a room full of Chinese developers and entrepreneurs awkwardly twiddling their thumbs - there's enough critical mass within Chinese markets to create the kind of 'daily innovation' without much input from outside.

Genuinely, massively disruptive innovation has always crossed over, and will continue to do so unless something drastically worse happens with censorship/politics.

*EDIT: plus blocking WhatsApp won't actually restrict meaningful foreign information crossing the borders - all it will do is make it difficult for dissidents to hide their online conversations, and piss off Chinese business people who need WhatsApp to converse with foreign clients.

Some would argue that it doesn't even need to cross over because multiple discovery is an actual thing with plenty of historical precedence [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

Don't put words in my mouth, I've never said something like that. I just wanted to highlight the fact that most people still prefer local services, either due to language barrier or social/information bubbles to disprove the claim that China would somehow be magically different if there was no Great Firewall.

China would rather be in control of tracking/surveillance internally, rather than let it be done by foreign companies and nations. Thats all

>Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;)

Because they don’t want local activists to be able to use it as a secure channel for communications. WhatsApp really is irrelevant to the market, but access to secure private communications is politically intolerable to the government.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2171739...

I don't get it. None of those are Chinese inventions. They're all technologies China adopted really fast. It's a testament to market size, development speed and certain idiosyncrasies about Chinese demographics, etc. But it has nothing to do with invention or innovation.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/tech/2017-08/08/conten...

> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

If the US isn't very good at developing new products because of burdensome regulations, small market size, slowness, demographics, etc. then maybe it's just not very good at technology. Other countries are bad at technology because of poor education, access to finance, skill of workers, culture, etc. They're still bad at technology, whatever the reason.

It isn't that interesting to say China has a huge mobile payments market dominated by Chinese companies when that is almost entirely due to a lack of an existing CC infrastructure.

It is interesting when Chinese network companies (Huawei, TP-link, etc.) are able to out-compete US based companies in their home market.

And hasn't been "successfully commercializing inventions, no matter who invented it" been a staple of the US economical success for decades, nay, over a century?

As one example, outside of tech areas that lacked strong traditional incumbents (fintech, e-commerce) or where strong cultural/linguistic context is needed (Chinese NLP), what areas are there where Chinese products enabled through blocking foreign ones are superior?

(e.g. I'd argue that Google's products for photos, email, maps/navigation, video conferencing, and translation -- all blocked in China -- exceed that of any competitor, Chinese or otherwise)

I'd be interested to hear why you think so. As far as I know none of these are better than their Chinese counterparts in any meaningful way. (Competition isn't the right word as these are different markets.)

Baidu Translate is at least as good as Google Translate, certainly better for translating to and from Chinese.

Google Maps is not relevant at all in the Chinese market because they don't have the data. Setting that aside, I am not aware of any technical edge they have over Baidu.

Chinese people generally don't use email, but there are mail providers that are comparable to what Google has.

This was really striking to me how bad Chinese-based ones were (which got me thinking about this issue). The QQ client doesn't even seem to work when I attempt to visit the international one; WeChat lacks a webapp with VC, has no Linux desktop app and the Windows desktop app I used had rendering difficulties with the self pip screen -- far worse experience compared to Skype and Google Hangouts.

> Baidu translate

Are your referring to http://translate.baidu.com/? Unless I'm missing something, that doesn't even offer speech to text or text to speech, making it far less viable for conversation.

> Maps

Right, I'm comparing US to China here. As a simple example, of something Baidu maps seems to omit, it doesn't offer time estimates for travel at an arbitrary point in time. I can see historical traffic data, but can't seem to get routing/time to drive under that historical data. I'm not even sure how well Baidu reroutes based on current traffic data..

> Email

Even at work is this true?

I'll give you that I don't have great comparison on this one (hard to use random email providers).. and that Outlook is quite good.But the integration between gmail and other services is extremely powerful -- e.g. extracting appointments + flights from my email and auto-populating maps and sending reminders.

Consumers have an app in their pocket that has everyone they know in it and can make a video call with two taps.

For corporate video conferencing there are paid solutions just like everywhere else.

So a free desktop app like Skype for video conferencing has no appeal.

> Baidu

The Baidu translate app has all those features and even a mini app for conversations in a walkie-talkie-like mode.

> Maps

You can set a future time for routing by public transit, and the real-time routing is pretty good. It doesn't try to predict road traffic conditions in the future. If Google has that feature I'd be curious how useful it is.

> Email

Big companies that have email have email systems. There's no demand for widespread public free email accounts because the public has no interest in email unless it's the only option.

I think the issue here is that it's easy to look at the features you use like Hangouts or Gmail calendar integration and think that Google is "ahead" technically. But in the Chinese market, the same needs are met in different ways by different products on a different mix of devices. So the features that you look at as "missing" haven't been developed because the market just doesn't care about them, not because Chinese internet giants lack the technical chops. They don't.

I think the way to look at it is not who is ahead, but that these are different markets with different values and the products look quite different, but you can't easily compare them by checking off features.

> VC

And both Hangouts and Skype both have very good mobile apps - at least on par with Wechat. The fact that the desktop component is limited sucks -- it makes it painful for me to say practice Chinese with relatives I have in China. (a laptop or desktop screen is a far better form factor than a small mobile device).

I agree with you that desktop is the 5% case, but that 5% is still a loss.

> Baidu

I just compared the Android apps side to side.

Google Translate's UX is far beyond Baidu's. Baidu's conversation mode requires holding a specific language button while I talk and releasing it when done. With Google, I can just turn the system on and have a conversation in both languages - it auto-detects the language spoken and pauses.

Google's camera based translation is also real time unlike Baidu.

> Maps

Transit: Google Maps also has this ability - it's also a simpler problem to follow train schedules than understand and route under historical traffic data. The historical driving feature is quite useful for Google when you are trying to plan any sort of outing. (If we're meeting tomorrow.. I need to know how much time to buffer in my schedule!)

> Email

Email is probably not a good item to discuss because the general public (i.e. not technologists) in America that only recently got on the Internet also favor other mediums over email. I'm only thinking of the technologist crowd here, but I don't have context on the Chinese one to comment.

I think the desktop case is 5% in the US, but 0.5% in China. It is more of a "mobile first" environment, because they skipped a lot of early PC development that only happened in the US.

> translation

I have tried both the Google and Baidu camera translation apps on iOS. The Google real time one was completely useless for me. You have to hold the camera steady and try to read the translation, which is word-for-word and hilariously wrong as often as not, and constantly changing as the camera moves and it (mis)reads the characters in different ways. Furthermore the stretched and overlayed "translated" English text is difficult to read. It looks like a very nice tech demo, but it has no practical utility for me. In contrast with the Baidu app, you take a picture, select the text with your finger, wait a moment while it considers, and you get a nice textbox with the selectable, translated text, and the OCR'd original language above. It's a practical tool.

My point is not that one is better or worse. Really it is that you cannot consider the tool alone without looking at how it is used in the market it was designed for.

Really the idea that Chinese companies are behind or aren't innovative is ridiculous if you look at how well they are adapting and how quickly they are innovating in the market that exists here.

>Как мне пройти на улицу кораблестроителей?

Google:

>How do I get to the shipbuilders' street?

Baidu:

>how can i go to the street considered for that?

Fuck this crap, even yandex translate is much better.

Yes, because foreign companies compete on an asymmetric playing field.

Creativity is inhibited when you have the cost of wondering whether what you've written or what you'll say will land you in jail. This problem is multiplied 1000x if you work in anything related to media or art. Consequently mainland entertainment will always be safe and boring. It's not going to see success like say South Korean or Japanese media industries

It's super obvious that the state of the mainland China entertainment industry is so terrible when you have most Chinese pirating foreign media

You are just confirming their logic.

I'm not saying pirated Marvel movies are going to bring down the PRC, but there's no reason to think that bad Chinese movies that no one wants to watch will help the party, either.

US is no longer a country to be emulated. It's a country to fear (for what they can, and do, to other countries) and a country to pity (for what it does to its own citizens).

China, OTOH, looks more and more cool now. A lot of things that made them seem evil turned out to be exaggerations and propaganda, and while their politics still wouldn't make me feel safe starting a business there, they seem to be the only country on the planet that seems to think and execute long-term. It's something the West is no longer able to do.

Hell, the Chinese currently seem to be the only nation on the planet who seriously care about fixing the climate issues.

China has a great opportunity now to win plenty of foreign mind share. I wonder if they'll go for it, and if we start seeing more pro-Chinese propaganda.

The issue about repression stifling creativity is orthogonal to that (unless to the extent repression might be necessary for long-term-ness), and gives them a huge disadvantage.

Which huge thing is huger is anyone's guess. They look to be winning so far. (What could really derail them is a bad leader, Mao-style. Checks and balances would be to avoid that. But that's a different topic altogether)

Such as?

The point being, whatever happened there 40 or 60 years ago, currently China is not that much different from the US, and unlike the latter, it's only getting better.

Many times, US companies take Chinese products "off the shelf" and slap their brand on it, based on a spec that the Chinese company themselves came up with on their own. Most manufacturers have catalogs for you to browse, and many are quite reluctant to modify their designs with your own specifications, although this depends on the company. So I would disagree that it's western companies cutting corners. Typically the manufacturers cut cost to increase their own margins, regardless of what spec you give them.

In the former Eastblock people weren't living in fear either, as long as they did not think of sticking their heads up too far above the field in terms of political activism and such. If you did then you were pretty sure to be targeted.

China today is still very repressive when it comes to political freedom.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2017/china

And as long as they are 'one party rule' I think that it is both strong and for political reasons. Keep in mind that all of politics is ultimately rooted in economy so it is pretty easy to get lost in the mix.

> Population control through forced abortions and murders everywhere (it turned out to be not true).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

It very much turned out to be true, and you can add a very large number of forced sterilizations to that list.

> Evil communist leaders.

That's an opinion, I'm not going to argue with opinions.

> Shit-quality manufacturing (that's the fault of western companies; China manufactures to the specs you give and pay for, it's western companies that decide to cheap out on products).

This is false. China can make quality products but there is also a culture of substitution where quality samples are replaced with lower grade manufacture at later points in a contract to deliver. This has bitten many Western companies that turned to China for their manufacturing and which has caused a lot of companies to bring their quality control to China, just before shipping to save on the amount of stuff shipped that simply did not work or did not work as advertised. This QA issue has been very well documented and can definitely not be laid at the door of the Western companies placing their orders in good faith.

> Those are all things I've been led to believe through media reports.

Media mostly reports, it mostly does not make stuff up. And most of those media reports are backed by at least my personal experience over the years where I will be more than happy to note that this stuff isn't a constant but that there are trends with some stuff improving and other things worsening. If you know your stuff it is very well possible to manufacture quality goods in China.

> The point being, whatever happened there 40 or 60 years ago, currently China is not that much different from the US

That is hilarious in so many ways. China is extremely different from the US along almost any axis that you care to name. Other than that of course the Chinese are people, just like Americans and Europeans but that's about it.

> and unlike the latter, it's only getting better.

This may very well be true, but then again, that's a function of where they were only a few decades ago. It's hard to remain at the top of something if there are other parties that wish to ascend, in dutch we have a proverb that reads 'standing still is going backwards' (I'm not sure how well that translates), but it fairly accurately sums up the sentiment.

You never thought the US was cool, but you watch their TV/movies, buy their clothes, use their tech, browse their websites for intellectual debate (hei HN) and use every other spare second to shit on the country and claim you hate it.

So pretty much like most Europeans. But the influence the US has on your life isn't going anywhere.

That's more position of ignorance, and thankfully it is changing.

Even Eastern Europe had a problem with such an attitude. There used to be a saying: "Americans are not going to buy Skoda, Chinese will". And indeed, Chinese do.

What makes you think Chinese are after making others follow them? I think they are pretty happy with the way things are now.

Do you think that's what we are after? Making others emulate us? That sounds racist to me.

And to achieve this specific status they do need others to follow them culturally. If no one outside of China is wearing Chinese clothes, watching Chinese movies, or listening to Chinese music, then they can't be considered a cultural globalization leader.

It is absolutely in China's best interest to promote their culture abroad, and they absolutely do spend tons of money doing it. Also, I'm not sure you know what racism is.

As an European America is shitting on me a lot more than China is.

I do agree there could be a "Galapogos Island" effect, I just don't know how to predict which industry will experience it vs the opposite. I wonder if someday the US will be the Galapagos in that relation though with the sheer size of China and it's possibility to trade with near neighbours India and Indonesia.

It's hard to predict the impact of potential trade restrictions and electrification requirements. The big multinational auto makers are pushing hard to harmonize rules around the globe, but populists and nationalists are pushing back.

So if the strategy is have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too why does the rest of the world play along? Corporate greed outside the control of governmental entities?

Like the parent and unlike the grandparent, I'm not convinced "openness" of the sort that fosters innovation requires liberal societal values. Openness in terms of not being legally restricted from copying and improving on existing products is the bigger one there, and China has this in spades. It's similar to the industrializing United States in the 19th century, which went from copying industrialized England to surpassing it - would less free political speech have stopped that?

As opposed to what? Economic sanctions have a wonderfully consistent track record of making things worse for everyone. China is too powerful for 'destroy the country and slaughter its people in a fit of pique' to work the way it did in Libya and Syria, which is just as well because that also makes things worse for everyone. The one thing that consistently works well is to maintain a free society and demonstrate a better alternative by example. Okay, granted, we should be doing more of that.

"Our companies don't have freedoms X,Y,Z vs Chinese corps in china, so Chinese corps and investors will get the same special treatment in our country too".

Taking a measure such as gp's suggestion, which is at least fair and on face justifiable, may be the most just move.

And given the particularity of this case, history probably doesn't have a huge sample size. New contexts emerge, such as technological development. It's much more conceivable now than before that a small group of people could indefinitely hold power over the overwhelming majority.

When someone is abusing you don't roll over, you create boundaries and walk away if they are violated.

And what is good about this practice is china has the power to stop this by treating everyone equally. Your not forcing things on china and you say you will stop when they stop.

Because having access to even a fraction of China's market is a huge boon to any company, as is having access to Chinese manufacturing. And playing along with China has made their society far more open and capitalistic, even if the ruling class occasionally attempts to assert their dominance.

China will progress at their own pace, but however they do it has to be homegrown. Simply overthrowing the ruling party like most westerners want would create chaos, the transition has to occur from within and at their own pace.

I think the argument in recent coverage like this is that it's no longer "has made their society far more open" but "HAD made their society far more open." And then it really exposes the financially-opportunistic, rather than principal-guided-as-advertised, nature of how the West deals with different countries like Cuba vs Iran vs China vs etc.

From destabilising Libya and Syria, to taking in refugees, to grandstanding with Russia, nothing is done for any set of moral principles.

Libya and Syria were 2 nations that believed in Arab and African pan-nationalism, and tried to assert independence and secularism in the face of Western hegemony and Saudi-sponsored Wahhabism. Sure they were dictators and unsavoury, but they also weren't any worse than the many dictators the West has propped up and sponsored over the years.

For years many economists and business leaders decried the high salaries, strong unions and high cost of doing business in Germany, Scandinavia, France and elsewhere, so they imported a bunch of refugees under the guise of humanitarian principles, and as a result they've broken the power of unions, have unlimited cheap labour and are dismantling parts of the welfare state (look at what Macron just passed through in France).

And finally in Russia, NATO has them completely encircled, we overthrew several governments on their borders and replaced them with pro-Western ones (see "Colour Revolutions", or hell, just look at Mikheil Saakashvili's career path), and then we decry the fact that they finally took action for self-preservation (they had a perpetual lease of the naval base in Sevastopol which the pro-Western government wanted to end, despite the understanding with Ukraine at the dissolution of the USSR).

And of course there's the various covert CIA actions throughout the years which have been declassified, it'll be interesting to see in the next 40 years how current events are portrayed in the future.

Also, take a look at various developing countries, and actions by the World Bank and western NGOs. Contrast that with how China has courted those same countries. I've been to countries which were decimated and abandoned by the West, and where the only infrastructure projects even happening are funded by China. I know a few people from those countries which even went to study in Chinese universities, and whose futures are going to be linked with China. No one from that country has any illusion of the West being 'good', as they were a former colony abandoned by the West.

Take Libya, for example, the choice was to either do nothing, and let a dictator kill a bunch of his own people, in which case the US would have been condemned as "propping up" the guy, or help the rebels, in which case they get accused of "destabilizing the country."

If they send a bunch of people to help the rebels rebuild their country afterwards, they're now "nation building" and/or "colonizing". If they do nothing now they're ignoring the country they helped to "destabilize". If they sign a bunch of deals to bring in new goods or open new factories is "western capitalism" and "worker exploitation", but if they leave them alone, or only send aid workers then it's "paternalism" all over again.

Maybe the reality is that even the most powerful country in the world couldn't do anything to help the problems of a country with millions of people, but they still take the blame for whatever happens, even if they do nothing.

And Syria is basically this situation, plus a bunch of global powers doing their proxy war nonsense, plus a bunch of power hungry murderers using a religious ideology as a justification to do whatever they want, along with a murderous government that wants to hold power at any cost. No wonder Switzerland tries to stay out of this sort of business, other than bankrolling some of the people involved anyways.

It turns out [1] that the claims of Libyan genocide were false. There were other choices than "do nothing" or "help the rebels". For example, a reasonable decision would have been to thoroughly, carefully and accurately investigate the genocide claims.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/29/hillary-clin...

Dunno if you are trolling, but that's impossible. You can't just overthrow the government if people don't want it. And supporting the revolution is absolutely normal, even China does it in Myanma.

Also, if they were wanted by a majority of the people, that's why pro-Russian governments were back in power soon after, right?

The Orange Revolution government barely lasted a couple years before imploding, and the Maidan government is going the same direction.

Even Mikheil Saakashvili can't work with Poroshenko, you'd think 2 CIA stooges would get along but apparently not.

Like Yanukovytch, who offered eurointegration, and was thrown after breaking his promises?

How's Poroshenko doing these days anyhow?

China two years ago or maybe China might permit enough market choice to allow basic innovation. But appetite of the repressive apparatus is not going to be sated and virtually all choices may wind-up being politicized. What happens when a well-connected individual asks you to invest-in/consult-for/etc their enterprise? What impact on your social credit might it have if you refuse?

It is fairly well established that secrecy and repression tends to breed corruption - when individuals have untouchable power, of course they'll want to leverage that for gain.

There have been just rulers for a while, but the risk of regression to the mean is ever present. We'll see how things go.

It's also not clear whether kleptocracy can't be implemented in a way such that it's not a significant detriment to development. Singapore is arguably a kleptocracy, but it's a surprisingly well-managed one.

But I think it's mostly a matter of time and happiness of the population. When things are good, the apple cart stays upright. If they turn grim, everything gets a lot more unstable and the extremes come out. Depending on where it goes, it can get into a feedback cycle - I think this happened in Venezuela.

There was a guy by the name of Norman Angell, who wrote a book called "The Great Illusion" about that exact thing. The premise, to quote Wikipedia, was that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous", on the basis of considerable economic interdependence of major powers.

The book was published in 1909.

Conceptualization is not making something actually happen, unlike what the patent-trolls want us to believe. IoT was first proposed in the 90s, but did it gain any traction before cheap Chinese prototyping components? This bares the question, is it the West that has made IoT or the East?

That could have been overshadowed if they could satisfy a niche. They are neither useful for going to work nor Indy Grabbing. Let's just hope next time the trend turns toward something like that it solves a problem.

I know what you're point seems to be even though you aren't communicating it very well. I do think you're missing the fact that producing goods cheaply does not make you a leader in tech. Besides quick fads like hoverboards or fidget spinners China does not have much traction with actually producing and selling products. Things might be made in China but they are designed by foreign companies and the vast majority of the profit leaves the country.

Hoverboards are originally from China [1] however, most of us have likely learned about them from Kickstarter etc. I think the users of HN would agree that "invention is never a sudden thing". The process for hoverboards has been iterative, of course. I have heard claims of having commercial hoverboards as much as five years before they became household names in the US.

[1] https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY?t=33m52s

It’s of course not nice to read such things, but who cares in the end. If you go to China, you’ll use Something else.

If China banned coca-cola and bragged about its burgeoning soft-drink industry we'd all be laughing at it.

I agree however that China can take a light enough approch and that's why I continue to think China growth will go on.

The possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me, however. I wrote a lengthy post about it not too long ago, and don't have anything useful to add to it yet, so please excuse the copy-paste:

To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of.

These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent.

If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service.

To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent.

All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers.

As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it.

I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant about the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).

with low value for the Chinese economy.

Comparing WeChat to WhatsApp on feature count is big time apples to oranges.

Wechat isn't simply chat. It has grown into a platform that has empowered it's users to partake in a growing ecommerce industry. It also has p2p payments which is hugely popular.

If Google or Facebook were given a monopoly on chat by the US government, and hardly anyone had credit cards, then their wallets would be universally popular too.

WeChat isn't going to get much market penetration outside of China because it's just not very good. At least that's my opinion, as someone who's forced it use it in China.

> optimize for political obedience

And put innovation in a grave. Without a gravestone.

they already do. China wields strong economic influence and pressure over her southeast asian partners, some of whom need to be convinced to give up significant portions of maritime control and territorial rights in an effort to redraw the american sphere of influence in the south china sea region, and further out to establish a new economic status quo in africa and S. Am, where the traditional western world's influence is more political than economic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

In 1984 Big Brother did this same thing by having perpetual war, and Chinese military spending is in fact stupendously huge, but even so they aren't actually in a war so need other ways to burn large quantities of capital. Building unprofitable railways in the middle of Africa is a great way to keep their own people poor whilst claiming some sort of moral high ground. But if these were good investments, it wouldn't be up to the PRC to make them.

A) Reach a predetermined level of technology you are comfortable with |OR| B) Look spacewards.

Very hard to do both of those.