In return for that china allowed the world to export its pollution and manufacturing . Those are trade-offs

China benefits greatly from that arrangement too.

It doesn't really work like that. The biggest pollution problem is CO2 and that doesn't stick around within borders.

Our companies just got greedy.

This! Until China is fully open and non-totalitarian, they don't have any right to complain.

it is not about them, its about why should there be some entity out there that censors my information and decides what I'm allowed to see and what I'm not allowed to see? why does the government here feel like it must interfere with me, censor and babysit me?

The proposed ban on TikTok is not about you. No one cares to babysit you. They want to punish china for the perceived injustice (and security risk).

China has an asymmetric market, and it’s bad for US businesses but good for Chinese businesses. The US wants to send a message to china that it can also punish businesses that it doesn’t like.

They don't want to babysit you - they just want to block stuff that you use because it's better for business! (they think)

yeah but it amounts to straight up censorship. Someone in the government decides what is safe for the citizens to see. How do you even ban it, does the US have mechanisms in place to enforce a government ban on a web site/app?

It’s incidental censoring. The content can and will move elsewhere, so it’s not preventing speech just limiting where it can go.

Yes the US has a mechanism to ban a company and that should apply to that company’s app. It’s just trade restrictions like with Huawei. Banning a website will be harder, but by banning advertisers from paying for ads it’ll destroy the profitability of serving American consumers.

Apart from what vineyardmark mentioned, there's a few additional levers, like having the app removed from app stores. I don't know what the current state of their traffic and DNS filtering capabilities, but if they really wanted to go nuclear they have jurisdiction over the com TLD. Wouldn't be the first time they've seized a domain on "national security, etc." grounds.

You can do all that easily in HKSAR, but you're mostly correct about the mainland. (technically you don't need a Chinese ID, just a permanent residence)

When President Trump raised tariffs on China in 2017 - economic soundness aside - the media commentary initially lambasted it as unprovoked xenophobic aggression. But the outrage soon died down as people looked at the numbers and saw it was a mere reciprocal setting of our tax rate to match or reach a fraction of China’s (and hopefully would enable future lowering negotiations). Now, in 2023, President Biden has maintained that course and the public has come around to more hawkish policy.

Popper’s Paradox on the geopolitical scale.

Pushing back on China, economically, has been broadly popular for a long damn time. It's just unpopular-among-actual-voters neoliberal trade policy, which has been the consensus policy of both major parties for decades, that's kept us from doing it—Trump, very notably, was the first major party Presidential candidate to run since probably some time in the '80s, on a platform with such a strong anti-neoliberal stance.

The media were freaking out about the trade restriction on China, but my circle of D-voting friends and I (and I'm about as libby-lib as a lib can lib) who mostly hated Trump were like "fucking good, more of this please".

I think he mostly caught at least as much shit as he deserved over his shenanigans (far less, in some cases—my "oh no, this is gonna be really bad for the health of our democracy" moment was when he made his "2nd amendment people" remark and suffered no meaningful consequences, back in the '16 campaign) but there were a handful of cases like that, where the negative media response was sharply at odds with our (as, again, solid D voters who AFAIK all voted against him twice) reactions to things he did.

Funnily enough, spinning a cloud VM is quite easy actually. You can do it in seconds on Alibaba Cloud. Getting port 80 unblocked on the other hand...

Arguing that the relationship is inherently completely asymmetric isn't really true either. Chinese companies can't really just create a single website that serves both western and Chinese customers. While nothing legally is stopping them, doing this is just going give your western customers a bad time overall, since content delivery across the Chinese border is all but impossible at any reasonable speed. TikTok is an American company, fully owned by Bytedance yes, but they went through incorporating in America and complying with all local laws to do so.

How many Chinese made websites do you use? Unless you're a Chinese immigrant, TikTok is almost certainly the only one. You might use e-commerce websites like AliExpress, but, again, AliExpress is a specially made website that was designed to follow foreign regulation. Chinese companies don't generally operate in other countries. The only reason TikTok is so popular is because they bought their way into the western market with millions of dollars with the acquisition of musical.ly. You have not shown any empirical evidence of any Chinese tech company actually being successful in the west, that hasn't just bought out some American competitor.

Also, nothing is requiring you to setup servers in China to serve your Chinese audience, and in fact it's almost certainly much more expensive to do that, not just for an ICP license but for bandwidth as well. You can serve your Chinese audience well with servers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong (for now), or other East Asian countries and as long as you follow Chinese laws, the GFW won't block you.

Sure, following Chinese laws is hard and goes against a lot of free speech principles, but at the end of the day the laws are enforced reasonably uniformly. Banning TikTok or Chinese companies in general just shows that Americans can't handle foreign competition. Instead I believe that a better solution would be to simply create uniformly enforced laws that create federal data processing regulation ... like Europe has already done with the GDPR ...