Allow me to elaborate a bit more: by implementing the firewall, China not only isolated itself, it enabled the western internet to concentrate western investment on Silicon Valley firms, that with no big Chinese companies around, established today’s western world internet monopolies. Or in plain English, by closing itself, China literally helped US companies dominate the www.

China on the other hand, not only had their domestic market entirely for their own domestic giants, creating their own expertise and talent pool, they also didn’t even had to think on what to do, as they could just copy US apps “with Chinese characteristics”, making A LOT of money too.

There was a lot of talk about technology transfer, but you right, the narrative 100% changed from helping the CCP to “China bad”, but how bad they really are when they allowed America to make a true empire on the www without the Chinese companies as competitors?

How America is reacting to its very first Chinese competitor says a lot about America true sportsmanship on the market, it’s very childish and lame if you ask me.

>or were banned (Twitter)

So companies that refuse to build tools for compliance with China's unique censorship/control policies are not allowed in the country. Most American tech companies opted to leave voluntarily rather than implement these controls, and at least one that did not implement the controls or voluntarily leave was instead forcibly banned.

I see the point you're making here, but at the same time, I think the situation as explained here can still be viewed as China not allowing American tech companies to operate in China the way those companies want to do business.

Has the US provided ByteDance with an opportunity to become compliant with this country's requirements that it has opted against? That would seem very similar to what transpired with Twitter in China.

The problem there is that Google, Facebook and Twitter refused to export American values abroad and chose to comply with the censorship laws of foreign governments. I do regard it as morally unacceptable for an American tech company to collaborate with political repression in a foreign country either by silencing dissidents or by helping that foreign government track down dissidents.

I also think it is quite reasonable that American tech companies should be allowed to operate in China and uphold American values in China if TikTok is allowed to operate in the US. I don't see a contradiction. The entire point of letting China into the WTO and allowing China to help Walmart and Amazon acquire inventory to offer "low prices" was to bring freedom to China by opening the country up to capitalism (this was stated more or less openly by western neoliberal policy makers at the time). It definitely wasn't to strengthen the CCP and weaken the USA but that's what the actual result of 2 decades of "free trade" with China has been.

There has been a very large increase in aggressive talk vs China. It feels very strange considering these same areas were against economic warfare with China when Trump was in Charge, and I would be money were against the Iraq and/or Afghanistan wars at some point. The "facts" don't matter. For what its worth, my memory is in line with yours, the back lash was absolutely on the US side.