The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

Some foreign companies follow the rules and are allowed to operate in China, while others are unwilling to follow the rules, either because they have ethical qualms about the rules (which involve censorship), or more cynically, because implementing those rules would be bad for PR back in the US.

More broadly, American tech companies do a massive amount of business in China. Apple is the largest smartphone brand in China. China is the or one of the most important markets for Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and many other American tech companies.

> If US companies can't operate in China except through a joint venture with a Chinese company, to which the US company must transfer its technology to, then same should apply to Chinese companies operating in the US.

Your understanding of how things work in China is out of date by about a decade. China has continuously reduced joint-venture requirements over time. There is a select list of industries that require joint ventures, and that list shrinks every year. For example, automobile manufacturing was removed from the list a few years ago, which is why Tesla was able to build its own plant in Shanghai.

> It should be clear at this point that negotiations with China won't change anything internally in China.

China is actually willing to negotiate over many aspects of how foreign companies operate in China, trade barriers, intellectual property, etc. If the conflict with the US were only about regulations on American companies in China, it would be relatively easy to solve. The Chinese government is very pragmatic about those sorts of issues.

However, the conflict is about something much more fundamental: the US government believes that China will soon surpass the US in overall geopolitical power, and the US government desperately wants to prevent that from happening. The US views the high-tech sector as China's Achilles' heel, and believes that it can blunt China's economic development through sanctions (for example, on imports of high-end chips, or on companies like Huawei, SMIC and YMTC). There's no way for China to negotiate with the US over this issue, because China is never going to agree to not develop its economy.

1. Shaping and manipulating minds. Eg, show healthy, educational, intellectual content to Chinese users, and unhealthy, addictive, emotional, short-attention-span-inducing content in US and foreign markets (already happening [1]).

2. Train AI that can be used for analyzing and further manipulating foreign publics, or for providing strategic insight into political and election dynamics, making political and election interference operations more effective.

3. Collate data on individuals gained from TikTok with other sources like credit ratings agency breaches, OPM, etc. for their entire life, to create a continually growing lifetime data profile on every American, European, Asian, South American, African, etc. which may be used for pressure, coercion, or manipulation operations or similar. Think of it as "customer lifetime value" [2] for political purposes.

None of which we want an adversarial, totalitarian foreign power to be doing to us.

[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657429

[1]:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tristan-harris-social-media-pol...

[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value

Nobody (in the US) wants this obviously.

Btw, the EU isn't anything better in this regard: We would like to forbid other countries to spy on us, but the EU authorities "need to have" the possibility "because terrorism, child abuse, and other 'harmful content' & 'disinformation'". (Just see the fresh Digital Services & Digital Markets acts).

Same surveillance everywhere. Only it's "OK" when done by "us", the "good ones", but not "the others", because they're the evil "bad ones"; of course.

Tell that to the Qing dynasty.