> one of the most controversial and what introduced me to this many years ago was the crypto export ban
Yeah, I'm well aware of that ban, which is what I was alluding to originally with the "even though it's not state secrets". Crypto isn't really a state secret, but it's classified as munitions, which is equally as weird and convoluted, and probably only really accepted because they were able to make a case about it being a national defense issue.
Controlling what companies can and can't do with their own property gets weird fast. So maybe some laws go in place to prevent China from cooercing IP from companies that want to work in their market. What if China just wants to outright pay for the technology and buy the IP? Is that okay? What if that purchase price is based on some other stipulation that they don't follow through on? The whole problem here is that some Chinese companies are willing to just say "screw it, your laws don't apply here and our prior agreements don't matter, and my government will back me up" and there's not a lot of recourse at a company level to stop that. The only way to actually stop any abuse is to disallow all business with China unless they adhere to the rules, but that's a hard sell when it looks like it's a nationwide ban because of a few bad companies, which is definitely how China would spin it and how it would be disseminated through specific media campaigns.
And actually banning business with China would be so disruptive and so unpopular for some companies (and companies that would be willing to push against that legislation) that it really would be extremely disruptive internally, and be presented as an issue of over regulation and big government intervention and racist and everything we've already seen before, just turned up to 11. And honestly, China might see that as a win no matter what happens, because it either exposes the dysfunction in our economic model or it moves it closer to their economic model, which would be a vindication of their path.