Is that a red herring?

The contention here is that one country does not allow the other to do business in their territory, yet complains when their product is threatened with a ban.

The contention is _not_ that double standards are being applied to TikTok vis-a-vis FB/Twitter.

Censorship is bad. Two wrongs don't make a right. I don't see why banning Facebook in China makes banning TikTok in the US good. It's like saying:

White people are discriminated against in China, so we should discriminate against Chinese people in the US.

I'm not sure if banning foreign businesses is "censorship".

But if you insist on calling money "speech" and banning foreign businesses "censorship" then it turns out, under your very broad definitions, censorship is sometimes a very good thing!

Your argument amounts to word games.

TikTok is not being banned because of what they say, they're being banned for what they are. Ergo it's not censorship.

Same thing when RT was banned across Western Europe. It's not what they were saying that was banned, it's what they are: an arm of the Russian government. Russian shills are still free to peddle their propaganda.

Sometimes two wrongs don't make a right. Sometimes you fight fire with fire. We can all pull aphorisms out of our butts to support our side of the argument.

What is China aiming for? Dumbing down hundreds of millions of westerners while their own population only sees "better" content?

Exactly the same arguments against TikTok can be made for basically any social media, "dumbing down the population". Only difference is what country's laws the company is regulated under, which hardly makes one better than the other.

Revenge for the opium wars.

They're already having that:

https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

I thought the opium wars were fought by the British after US independence