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No, China didn’t ban Google or Facebook… China wants these companies play its rules, and these companies choose to not play. It’s not a ban.

Look at many Europe companies and Microsoft.



How is that fundamentally different from a ban?

You could phrase it thus:

"Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country"

"We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here"

"Then you are banned"


A ban means when you operate in a country, you violate their rule, or whatever they call rule, then you are banned.

In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit.

These are different.

Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned.

Now you get it?


Right, which is why the US Congress is looking to pass a rule that says "don't be beholden to the Communist Party".

Then Chinese companies can either choose to play or leave.


No one is beholden to anyone in this war.

With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening.

The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.




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