You’re overestimating the number of people that care about it. A good chunk of people really don’t care about privacy, data security and potential exposure to propaganda, no matter how much we (engineers who actually care about it) tell them to.

I assume most americans today are already under the impression their government spies on them and facebook/google will gladly give anything that is asked for, how does the chinese spying on them make any difference for the average citizen? If I was a regular american and had to choose I'd take the foreign spy 10/10 times. What will the chinese do to the regular american citizen compared to what his own contry could do with this information?

If you're diaspora and other smaller interest groups for sure, but the general citizen probably wouldn't care at an individual level. I'd argue that the NSA revelations and how everything just got worse and worse since then killed any chance of the public caring about this kind of stuff.

> people read the same intel reports and knew how far the Chinese spies

People do, and after Snowden revelation, they wonder why they should care.

The population was forced to accept the fact that they are constantly spied on 10 years ago.

Decisions have consequences.

Well, those who made the decision decided to keep the intel secret, so we'll never know.

You bring up valid point. Did the legislators lie en masse to us about national security to remove a competitive app from the American ecosystem or not. If the national security issues exist, where is the outrage from our elected officials? If not, our government is for sale.

A lot of people hold the view that privacy isn't important unless you have something to hide. They likely wouldn't care about some government on the other side of the world knowing what stupid tiktok videos they watch.

They probably would. But so long as the decisions are made using secret information, how can we know? We can only assume they are lying to us, until they show the proof.

Until they're shared to the public, the wise move is to choose not to believe them.