China’s hand is rather weak here for a number of reasons.
First, it has already banned the American equivalents - Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. Not much retaliatory ammo.
Second, the adoption of HarmonyOS while rapid within China, is lackluster outside of it. With regards to software platforms the US still has a near monopoly globally. This means it can’t really prevent a global ban if the US decided to long arm its jurisdiction through Android & iOS. It will have to rely on the EU and other countries resisting the ban and threatening to take Google & Apple to the courts.
Third, while the attack on free speech argument is powerful ideologically and can be weaponized against the US, ultimately China can’t use it that well because it is itself guilty of restricting free speech especially in the context of foreign propaganda. I mean, China doesn’t even allow access to Reddit, Wikipedia, etc. So it doesn’t have much of moral high ground to go on.
I think the most that can be done is accelerating Chinese phone vendors and application makers to move off of Android & iOS through putting Google and Apple into the unreliable entities list. But Chinese companies actually do tons of business through Android and iOS so even a soft ban would have significant negative consequences. For this reason I don’t think China will go that far & may just target smaller players like approval of American games & movies & productivity tools where there is a Chinese equivalent.
