> Reciprocity is not a good idea.

Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.

That's how wars are won. Those who are nice to enemies because of "values" get crushed by the ruthless opponents.

But China banning foreign apps also plays into their stranglehold on their domestic media and economy, so it's not a purely adversarial move against the US.

Or to put it another way, should the US also ban/censor Chinese art and cinema within it's borders?

If it's going to help US in any way, why not? TikTok is eating the lunch of US social media apps so fair to play the protectionism game.

There’s no adversary here. There’s no ongoing war. In fact, up until the US started imposing restrictions on China, the US was one of China’s largest trade PARTNER.

US social media is banned in China because it doesn’t comply with local censorship laws, nor because it is American. They impose the same censorship on local individuals and organisations too.

> Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.

Every little thing the West does is already played up in China and spun as an intentional attack aimed directly at China because the West wants to destroy China. Usually this is conveyed in news broadcasts set to a backdrop of video of various US military exercises.

A lot of the support the Chinese government enjoys comes from people in China generally seeing the country as much better off than it was a few decades ago, and a sense of nationalism and conflating the government, country, and people as one. An attack on China is an attack on all of us is an attack on me.

Whatever you do in retaliation is just building the public and political will, or even public demand, within China for them to take harsher measures or escalate things further.

Despite the government's efforts, the populace is not exactly entirely isolated from the outside world. There are many people who, while maybe not fully distrusting of the government, definitely smell something fishy. They're curious, and they want to and are able to learn more.

Heading into the 2030s, China itself is already forecasting China's going to enter a period of negative population growth. Combined with a variety of cultural forces, this could be even more impactful than in some other countries. And it will only get worse with time. "Better off than we were a few decades ago" may soon become clearly untrue to a lot of people. The government knows this is coming and is trying to prepare by strengthening their grip.

I think a smarter long term move here would be to just... not. Let them yell at the clouds. Make whatever information we can freely available to the curious in any way we can. Welcome those that want to embrace Western values with open arms. Model the world that we think is best.

Rather than giving China the government the tools and ammunition needed to unify the people and rally them behind China the government... let's just wait. When the people feel the government is failing them, instead of leaving them feeling isolated and vulnerable... let them see they have somewhere else to turn.

Or, y'know, escalate this towards an economically and politically unstable nation of 1.5 billion people who think the West is the cause of all of their woes and see how it all shakes out. That'd definitely show everyone we have the biggest dick.

That's not how you win wars, that's how you start them. Diplomacy is a thing.

It only works when one party isn't interested in starting a war in the first place.

and why on earth would China want to start a war with us? We are a huge trading partner and yes there's a lot of posturing and conflicting geo-political interests, cultural views etc but that doesn't mean that war is their goal.

Diplomacy only works when both sides are playing fair. If China is going to ban US apps unilaterally, US should reciprocate in kind.

Reciprocity is a great idea. It takes the emotion out of the decision: we don’t allow X from Y because Y doesn’t allow X from us. It makes sense for trade at least.

Then there is no need to find another excuse that might be offensive.

It also lets somebody else make your decision for you, though, which is probably not a good strategy.

If you can’t make a decision always, it works out. Besides, this is a simple reciprocal trade sanction, which are rarely so straightforward. No one in China is seriously going to admonish the USA for banning TikTok when even China blocks it (since it allows content banned in China), while most Americans who would care probably don’t vote.

It seems like an approach that begs to be gamed, though. Country A bans something, Country B reciprocally bans the something. Years later, Country B realizes it's at a severe disadvantage because County A has hoarded all the something and now there's a something shortage in Country B that was planned and executed by a Country A.

Obviously not probably an issue with social networks, but mindlessly banning something just because somebody else banned something seems like a recipe to be tricked.

It took us 5 years to go from “let’s ban TikTok” to actually banning TikTok. I don’t think it’s going to be very exploitable, and it’s not like China where Facebook works one day and then just doesn’t (China doesn’t publicize what it bans and for what reasons, even a list of banned sites is orobably considered a state secret).

If you made a literal mindless robot to reciprocally ban anything another country banned, yes, that would probably be exploitable. Normalising reciprocal bans and applying even a little bit of human oversight seems fine though.