"National Interest" is the key phrase, and the US has similar protective barriers in key industries. Food security is one such area that the US protects, and to that end, it provides a lot of agricultural subsidies preventing a lot of foreign farmers from entering the American market. The pearl-clutching when China does the same in their national interest is lacking in self-awareness.
The US agricultural subsidies have interesting first- and second-order effects (cheap corn syrup, obesity and corporate farm consolidation) - but I digress.
* Coke
* Starbucks (the largest one in the world is currently in Shanghai)
* KFC
* McDonalds
* Pizza Hut
* Domino's Pizza
* US movies regularly make as much money in China as they do in the US.
* General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US.
Have they put in place limits that they are legally allowed to put in place based in WTO rules? Yes.Part of the reason that AWS has two separate companies is because China, the US & the EU have laws like the CLOUD Act, GDPR and CDPR. It is easier to keep all companies seperate or at least siloed which is what most large companies do.
China is the most populated country on earth and an emerging superpower. They have every right to consider themselves exceptional, just the way the US considers itself exceptional.
To posit another angle: most international nations are smaller markets than the US (individually) so it doesn't make sense to customize things for every nation, which would be a goddamn nightmare. But this is a country of over 1.3 Billion people. China would need to be an exception anyway, and AWS having a subsidiary in China doesn't illustrate the unfairness of China's practices as much as the reality of how important that market really is.
What's an international nation?
Being highly populated and powerful is not really an exception in history. The USA got (? gets) its sense of exceptionalism from their innovative form of government/constitution that provided more freedoms than any government in history. The roots are based in a sense morality.
Hint: America is not about flag waiving, native pride that you betray in your statements ("can't stop visiting _our_ websties ")
It's understandable though from China's perspective, that they aren't willing to give up important strategic sectors like social media or internet search to some US corporation. Especially so with their intention of being a rivaling global superpower to US one day. But it seems the economical aspect of increasing the revenues of Chinese companies has been as important or even more, which makes this practise more or less just cheating. Not that others are playing always fair, but China seems to be doing it considerably more than the others.
Just as an anecdote, AWS offers its Chinese region as a separately owned Chinese company, completely separate from other AWS regions. To me it speaks volumes how restrictive and hostile the Chinese market is to foreign companies, can you imagine having to do the same for each country? It would be a nightmare for global economy. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/13/aws-exits-china/