I think that Snowden showed us that this is not actually true. Things like National Security letters and the PATRIOT act make the US to me, as a European, seem very hypocritical right now.
The patriot act was passed after 9/11 where the people were hurt and scared. There is backlast against the Patriot act too. Besides PRISM was a highly classified program because the people wouldn't be okay with that type of surveillance here in the U.S where the expectation of privacy isn't even a thing in China.
They are two totally different worlds.
You can't deny the hypocrisy here. While our citizens might support him they don't to the extent that they can pressure governments enough to allow him to return home.
Search "false equivalence". Use Baidu. Or Yandex.
First, they've had neighbor surveilling (snitching on) neighbor to control the people since Mao: it's part of the culture and fully accepted because they can't envision another way. They have a saying [ref needed] "Such a people deserve such a government." Now of course the whole tech stack supports it. We're just getting used to ubiquitous domestic surveillance in the West.
Second, because they've further along, they've used their control of information to abuse their power. Tibet, Tiananmen, organ harvesting, and more lately the Uighur atrocities against people of dissent or race. The West is not there but you can see we're blasting down that road now.
These are not even remotely comparable. China is an outright police state. Not saying the United States doesn't have a lot of work to do with regards to personal liberty, but the Government here has nothing close to the iron grip control that the CCP has; they may want it, and what Government doesn't, but they don't have it and a ton of our internal legal mechanisms are designed specifically to prevent it.
We should be able to discuss America's governance failures and problem areas without conflating them with horribly regressive models of governance.
Or since the Boxer Rebellion.
Or since before the Opium Wars. And probably even much earlier.
I ask because my experience across the Western net has been seeing lots of debate. This thread is a good example. I only see Chinese netizens appear in huge angry voting brigades, spamming threads with proclamations, denunciations and flimsy claims.
So I genuinely wonder; does vibrant and open debate take place somewhere? How/where could I see what such debates look like?
You will never see it anywhere on the internet, because from the very beginning your decision has been made. Anything you read will be morphed according to your belief. Anyone pro China on this site is immediately either labeled as brainwashed retards or paid shill. That's why there are no discussions, it's just your echo chamber.
Whataboutism?
That's not evidenced by the massive presence of US companies in China. American companies do vastly more business in China than vice versa. Whenever I see these sorts of claims, I ask what specific restrictions or hurdles are being discussed.
But as to your point, some of the things that make it difficult for western countries to do business there is the great firewall, draconian privacy laws https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/09/chinas-new-cybersecurit...
and subsidies (both monetary and policy) from the Chinese government that make it almost impossible for foreign companies to compete against domestic companies.
> China is a known currency manipulator
The accusation has always been that they're suppressing the value of their currency (in order to boost exports), which would actually mean that their nominal GDP understates rather than overstates the size of the economy. Whether these accusations are true is a different question.
> It's a third world country with vast majority of its citizens in poverty.
It's certainly not a Third World country anymore (technically, this is a misuse of the term "Third World," but I'll go with it). GDP/capita in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin (China's 3 largest cities) is about $20k, which puts them roughly on the same level as the Czech Republic, Greece and Estonia, and just slightly below Portugal and Taiwan. Lots of Chinese cities are richer than these three (Shenzhen is at $32k/capita, similar to South Korea). On average, Chinese GDP/capita is about $10k, similar to Mexico and Turkey. That's pretty much average for the world.
There are certainly huge differences between different regions of China (Beijing is way more developed than a random farming village in the West of China), and there's enormous inequality within every part of China, so there are a lot of poor people. However, there are also a few hundred million people living what you would recognize as middle-class lives. That's why you'll see so many Chinese tourists these days at any random tourist destination around the world - they have the money to afford those sorts of luxuries now.
> Vast majority of the people there are not doing well and it's not a prosperous country.
Most Chinese people would agree with you that China is not yet "prosperous." Even the Chinese government officially agrees with you on that. They are doing vastly better than they used to, though, and the country as a whole is no longer poor. It's about average for the world now, but with a high growth rate and some highly developed regions in the East. Whether they make the final push into developed-country status remains to be seen.
You keep saying this sort of thing, but yet, all sorts of foreign companies do booming business in China. The likes of Starbucks, KFC, Volkswagen, Intel, Boeing and Airbus absolutely dominate their respective markets in China. For a long time, Apple was crushing it in China (until Chinese consumers decided the quality/price ratio was too low).
> But as to your point, some of the things that make it difficult for western countries to do business there is the great firewall, draconian privacy laws
The privacy laws you're citing were only just passed about a month ago. They can't have been a hindrance before. The Great Firewall affects every business in China, both foreign and Chinese.
> Just because there are U.S companies in China
It's not just that there are a few US businesses here or there in China. Foreign businesses have an enormous presence in China. It's the most important single market in the world for a very large number of American and European businesses. If that's what business "hell" looks like, I can only imagine how great heaven is.
> The U.S is a much bigger economy than China and that's one of the reasons why you see penetration from U.S companies in China.
It depends on how you measure the size of an economy. In purchasing power parity units, the Chinese economy is larger than the American economy. Going by the exchange rate, it's smaller. The question of which economy is larger is actually ill-defined.
However, the reason why there's greater penetration of American companies in China than vice versa is that the US economy is more developed. There are simply many more leading companies in many sectors in the US. In the late 1970s, China began courting foreign investment, which meant courting foreign companies. Far from making life "hell" for those companies, the Chinese government tried to give them attractive conditions. Many foreign companies invested large sums in China, and made enormous profits out of those investments.
Now, for the first time, Western companies are facing peer competitors from within China, and you suddenly hear cries of how China is taking advantage of everyone. The crazy thing is how all perspective is lost. The massive presence of foreign companies in the Chinese market and the massive exploitation of cheap Chinese labor by foreign corporations are forgotten, and all we hear about are how it's supposedly impossible to do business in China.
If you are ever in China, go into a grocery store and look at the aisles. The main reason why American products are priced at 200%-300% the competition is because of tariffs. Tariffs designed to make ordinary middle class American products only affordable by rich elites. It's a very effective cap on market share.
This particular case is likely because the usage of deodorant is not a thing in China. The majority of East Asia doesn't have the body odor issue. It's a gene thing.
1. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TM.TAX.MRCH.WM.AR.ZS?lo...
Here we go. "CCP is bad and China is bad, so every Chinese is bad". This kind of logic is not very healthy, it just like saying "Google(Or insert any company here) is bad, let's punish their employees", it will hurt those employees (way) more than it hurt Google.
Put the story into context, if Chinese engineers cannot find a job oversea, they will probably go back to China and contribute to a Chinese company that operate under CCP's rule. Will that be a good thing for you eventually?
I bet CCP is also counting on the rising nationalism in the US as well, to drive Chinese engineers back home with their valuable knowledge.
OP even mentioned that moves restricting hiring in China from US will help their Chinese based company.
> CCP is bad and China is bad, so every Chinese is bad
This is a very unfair summarization of the parent comment. They never implied that conclusion. Yes, the CCP is bad; And they control China and the Chinese people. But that does not say anything about the people themselves other then they are subject to the communist rules. It is a resistance to the CCP privacy practices that brings this change.
China has always had double standards. They make it hell for U.S companies to do business there. The only thing that has changed is that the U.S has started pushing back somewhat as of late, but things are still currently in favor of China.
When China makes draconian laws like this: https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/09/chinas-new-cybersecurit...
Is it really a surprise that companies that care about their customer privacy would be hesitant in dealing with China? Is it inconceivable that data breaches and unauthorized access of data/systems could happen through Chinese employees? These are some of the things you have to think about.
Maybe the Chinese government should look at the year (2019) and realize that personal liberties, sovereignty and privacy are important to the "west". If China is going to disrespect our important values, than what you are seeing in this Gitlab discussion is bound to take place for companies that are sensitive about protecting their customers.