This is really quite false.

Rules are broken all the time, they are difficult to arbitrate, and often they are not.

The CCP requires foreign entities to surrender critical IP, then hand it off to a state-backed competitors, they don't allow full ownership of local companies, there's direct political interference including the requirement for all companies to directly hire CCP members as oversight, and if it's important enough, to have the CCP right on the board.

All of this in addition to the death by a thousand cuts the system can make for foreign competitors via local bureaucratic requirements at every level.

This applies not only to commerce but critical institutions such as WHO which are directly compromised by China (i.e. not allowing any material investigation into 'lab leak origins' etc. etc..)

The OP presented the situation very clearly: there is no way in any scenario that China would allow an American company to have a TikTok like app used by large swaths of the Chinese population, controlled by the US.

Neither would Russia.

On some level, that kind of thing is a bit understandable, I don't quite mind if China would not allow 'Facebook' to be the #1 communications tool in China, that said, it should be reciprocal.

And for other things, like high-speed rail etc. China has been grabbing IP using leverage that never should have been allowed.

Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram worked pretty well here, to the point where almost every teenager has an Instagram account, so I think this is proven to be false. The only reason Instagram is banned now is because of the ability to use it to spread pro-Western propaganda instead of pro-Russian one.

That isn't completely true anymore.

"Foreign investors are now allowed to establish wholly foreign-owned enterprises for whole vehicle manufacturing, including special purpose vehicles, new energy vehicles, commercial vehicles and passenger vehicles."

https://www.iflr.com/article/2a647jipe3beiloc6xeyo/primer-ch...

See Golden rule and Silver rule.

So China ran away with renewable tech developement because greedy Wall Street executives didn't want competition to their lucrative fossil fuel investments. Fucking retards.

However the true question here is more likely to be "what does unfair mean".

Tik tok dominating is just good old outcompeting the competition.

Protectionist strategies create less domestic competition, resulting in underdeveloped industries that would die off in the face of real competition. So if Chinese companies are insulated from outside competition then in theory they should have a harder time developing globally competitive products. If we continue to allow TikTok and other Chinese products it is not without inherent benefits of increased competition driving better domestic competitiveness.

Of course it just all looks like we are getting screwed because TikTok is outcompeting despite all this, but banning or hobbling it will just make Facebook et al complacent and likely even less competitive in the global market.

We need the competition, basically, if for no other reason than the fact that a competitive market is what underpins healthy capitalism.

Plus, subsidies are simply another form of protectionism and the US heavily engages in this too. We can’t pick and choose when protectionist policies are applied because everyone is doing it in certain industries.

You can't sell your widgets in my location. Would you as a seller of widgets think that is fair?

I know the reality is more nuanced than that but people are talking about reciprocal agreements to at least ensure some sense of fairness.

The rest of the world is generally playing on a level globalist playing field of free trade and open competition. The theory for decades has been that if the world treats China like every other country and then over time they will become more open. But this theory has been disastrously wrong. China’s communist party is a mercantilist country where the government and private industry act together as one.

Huawei/China Telecom/etc. notwithstanding, though they are not exactly social media competitors vs. Google/Meta.

Distributing software for you to run on your own hardware is speech, though, and it's protected by the first amendment. You can license the distribution of your own software if you want, but you can't tell me I can't give you software if you want it.

Basically: how do you think this would work, in a way that wouldn't also make Linux or gcc or whatever available only at the whim of the government?

And the "software is free speech" argument itself doesn't apply when we are talking about something malicious that is installing keyloggers and transferring private data to overseas servers.

TikTok is not an American citizen. Nobody is preventing American citizens from printing the source code of TikTok on their tshirts so that people can compile it and use it. This is the only conceivable scenario where the 1st amendment would apply.

And even if that was happening, the US could rightfully ban use of Chinese owned servers in the US. Then we'd get what happens in China: a US-owned entity forms to run TikTok in the US. It is now subject to US rules and regulations etc.

Plus, criminal speech can be restricted in any case. If it's determined that the TikTok app is violating the law or facilitating the commission of criminal activity, the distribution of that app could itself be deemed a crime, or even worse for app stores, subject them to civil liability.

This definitely needs a reference.