Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

> subsidies (both monetary and policy) from the Chinese government that make it almost impossible for foreign companies to compete against domestic companies.

You keep saying this sort of thing, but yet, all sorts of foreign companies do booming business in China. The likes of Starbucks, KFC, Volkswagen, Intel, Boeing and Airbus absolutely dominate their respective markets in China. For a long time, Apple was crushing it in China (until Chinese consumers decided the quality/price ratio was too low).

> But as to your point, some of the things that make it difficult for western countries to do business there is the great firewall, draconian privacy laws

The privacy laws you're citing were only just passed about a month ago. They can't have been a hindrance before. The Great Firewall affects every business in China, both foreign and Chinese.

> Just because there are U.S companies in China

It's not just that there are a few US businesses here or there in China. Foreign businesses have an enormous presence in China. It's the most important single market in the world for a very large number of American and European businesses. If that's what business "hell" looks like, I can only imagine how great heaven is.

> The U.S is a much bigger economy than China and that's one of the reasons why you see penetration from U.S companies in China.

It depends on how you measure the size of an economy. In purchasing power parity units, the Chinese economy is larger than the American economy. Going by the exchange rate, it's smaller. The question of which economy is larger is actually ill-defined.

However, the reason why there's greater penetration of American companies in China than vice versa is that the US economy is more developed. There are simply many more leading companies in many sectors in the US. In the late 1970s, China began courting foreign investment, which meant courting foreign companies. Far from making life "hell" for those companies, the Chinese government tried to give them attractive conditions. Many foreign companies invested large sums in China, and made enormous profits out of those investments.

Now, for the first time, Western companies are facing peer competitors from within China, and you suddenly hear cries of how China is taking advantage of everyone. The crazy thing is how all perspective is lost. The massive presence of foreign companies in the Chinese market and the massive exploitation of cheap Chinese labor by foreign corporations are forgotten, and all we hear about are how it's supposedly impossible to do business in China.

> things like pulling out of Syria to enable the Turkish murder of the Kurds to continue

That's an incredibly disingenuous take. America has no business being there in the first place, so there is nothing wrong with having US troops leave that region.

By your logic, the US is responsible of all the atrocities in the world where it doesn't have special operators acting as human shields.

Besides, your FUD is a bit dated. Kurds simply went seeking protection with Syria and Russia and in the end, not much happened.

I could use the exact same argument to propose banning Americans from GitLab. I'd also have much better empirical grounds for doing so, given how much is known about the extent of US espionage.

There's a growing hysteria in the US about China, which is leading to increasing signs of discrimination and harassment of Chinese people in the US. This sort of demonization of an entire country and the politics behind it (preservation of the US as the world's dominant power by containing China) are very dangerous. The thing that makes it most disturbing is the way people across the political spectrum have bought into the idea of the Yellow Peril, and are now okay with discriminatory policies, the trade war, and challenging Chinese territorial sovereignty.

It seems you can't mention ^ those keywords without the sensitivity brigade downvoting you.

> here's a pretty significant online mob who really want to split HK off of China

There are significant online mobs dedicated to anything. That's not really a convincing argument. People who are advocating independence don't understand the situation, nor do they even understand what the protestors actually want (it's not independence).

> Why aren't we focused on cleaning our own house first if it's about justice and freedom?

It's almost as if America isn't comprised solely of 1 person! Not to mention, why can't people focus on both? This argument is basically "america has issues, so it can't point fingers". Not only is this an unconvincing argument, it doesn't make sense because what is "america"? Is it me, a singular US citizen? Is it Gitlab, a company headquartered in America with ~50% American employees? Is it just the US govt?

> Why hasn't it happened? Because people aren't informed and don't vote based on that. That is another complex discussion in and of itself, but most people that I know are against it, so I don't really get what your argument is.