As President Donald Trump contemplates barring the People’s Republic of China-originated and -based communications app WeChat from operating in the US, some businesses worry.

US companies whose fortunes are linked to China are pushing back against the Trump administration’s plans to restrict business transactions involving the WeChat app from Tencent Holdings Ltd, saying it could undermine their competitiveness in the world’s second-biggest economy.

Couple things about that.

Those companies shouldn’t make themselves so dependent on the People’s Republic of China for their business health.

The other thing is that those companies aren’t actually competitive in the PRC. They’re “competing” against domestic companies that get the benefit of PRC government subsidies and preferential legal treatment. Those companies also operate inside the PRC only at the suffrage of the PRC government—a suffrage that requires access to their intellectual property, backdoors in their core business software, and since 2017, PRC-based subsidiaries’ cooperation with the PRC intelligence community.