American politicians who want to copy Chinese policies to retaliate for unfair treatment of American companies would be retaliating against American citizens for unfairly having First Amendment rights when Chinese citizens don't.

> Google said the cyber attack originated from China and that its intellectual property was stolen, but that evidence suggested a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

How many Chinese human rights activists use or used Hotmail?

Google and Facebook both used to operate in China. The government of China told them to start censoring certain content. US lawmakers did not like this and warned the companies not to comply with Chinese rules. So the companies left China to keep the US side happy.

So to be clear, there was active pressure from the highest levels of US government for American companies not to build products in China that could be used for censorship.

The revisionist history is wild.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/12/google-ch...

See this is one of the advantages of having an open society. Google is not censored in the US and we can look up the history of Google being forced out of China.

> Google said the cyber attack originated from China and that its intellectual property was stolen, but that evidence suggested a primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.