8 TIME August 17/August 24, 2020
F
IRST THEY WENT AFTER HUAWEI. THEN IT WAS
gummy bears singing Adele. TikTok—the social-
media platform where primarily Gen Z users
share dance routines and zany memes involving
crooning fruit candies and the like—has become the lat-
est fl ash point in the escalating tech war between the U.S.
and China, with President Donald Trump threatening on
July 31 to ban the app on national-security grounds.
U.S. government experts warn that TikTok—the U.S.
subsidiary of Beijing-based ByteDance—could be used to
spread misinformation and funnel user data to the Chi-
nese state. In response, ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming
insisted his fi rm fully respected “user data security, plat-
form neutrality and transparency.”
But, seeing the writing on the wall, ByteDance has
moved to sell TikTok to Microsoft, after the latter’s CEO
Satya Nadella received assurances from Trump. A deal
for the estimated $50 billion app would have to be com-
pleted by Sept. 15 but has sparked a backlash in Beijing
after Trump said the U.S. Treasury should re-
ceive a “substantial portion” of any agreed fee
“because we’re making it possible.” Hu Xijin,
the outspoken editor of Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) mouthpiece the Global Times, de-
cried the prospective sale as “open robbery.”
It’s just the latest salvo between the world’s
two biggest economies as relations disintegrate.
Beyond tech supremacy, Beijing and Washing-
ton are feuding over trade tariff s, the detention
of 1 million ethnic Uighur Muslims in China’s
Xinjiang region, the erosion of freedoms in
semi autonomous Hong Kong and the militari-
zation of the South China Sea—not to mention
the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This Administration fundamentally be-
lieves that the Xi Jinping government poses an
existential threat to U.S. national security,” says
Samm Sacks, cyber security policy and China
digital economy fellow at the New America
think tank. “Large Chinese companies are in
the crosshairs, and then it’s a moving target
what the specifi c risk is.”
THE RISK WITH TIKTOK is very diff erent from
that presented by the telecom giant Huawei,
which the Trump Administration has targeted
with sanctions and encouraged allies to black-
list. Huawei is a market leader in building 5G in-
frastructure, and security concerns on commu-
nications networks are self-evident (though, in
Huawei’s case, unproved). The fear with TikTok
appears to be that Beijing could pair data gleaned from the
app with information with information already harvested
in hacking on U.S. citizens, allegedly sponsored by China.
As a national-security argument it’s “pretty weak,” says
Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert at the Council on For-
eign Relations. The reality is that the Trump Administra-
tion is acting primarily on commercial concerns, he says:
“TikTok is the fi rst social-media platform out of China
that became truly global.”
Banning TikTok would be an escalation, but in keep-
ing with a broader trend of economic disengagement be-
tween the rival superpowers. In recent years, the Com-
mittee on Foreign Investment in the United States has
ramped up blocking Chinese acquisitions of U.S. strate-
gic assets. The Trump Administration is also threatening
to delist Chinese fi rms trading on U.S. bourses that fail to
properly disclose fi nancial information. For Orit Frenkel,
a former offi cial at the Offi ce of the U.S. Trade Represen-
tative who has worked on Asia trade policy for more than
three decades, it’s a marked change of attitude. “Twenty
years ago, no one foresaw things moving in this direc-
tion,” she says. “To descend into a full-fl edged Cold War
would be extremely unfortunate.”
Responsibility also lies with Beijing, which on top of
compelling private fi rms to aid national security mat-
ters, shrouds its economy in red tape and still denies ac-
cess to Facebook, Twitter, Google and many other
U.S. fi rms. The question is now not whether de-
coupling of the two economies will happen, but
how far it will go—and who will be targeted next.
Chinese tech giant Tencent is a major investor in
Reddit, for one. Wanda Group owns AMC Cinemas
and Hollywood studio Legendary Entertainment.
PR representatives of Chinese companies are ter-
rifi ed of courting American markets lest, as one re-
cently told TIME, “we become the next Huawei.”
Or TikTok, it seems. Analysts are now watching
to see if Beijing retaliates against U.S. fi rms with a
strong China presence, such as Apple, Microsoft or
Intel. “That danger is real,” says Frenkel. “We’ve
seen this kind of tit for tat over past years in the
U.S.-China relationship.”
The relationship hasn’t looked so rocky in de-
cades. Each side has closed a consulate belonging
to the other and expelled journalists. The U.S. has
banned Chinese graduate students with ties to
the military, and piled sanctions on offi cials over
human -rights abuses in Xinjiang. A proposal to
ban all 92 million CCP members and their fami-
lies from entering the U.S. is gaining traction.
So what does the U.S. gain from this mul-
tifront blitzkrieg? Some suspect China hawks
are punishing Beijing before November, mind-
ful of Trump’s plummeting polls and the pros-
pect of a Biden White House seeking to build
bridges. “Some in the Administration want to
burn as much down as possible,” Segal says, “so
that it’s very hard to reset the relationship.” □TheBrief Opener
‘We’re making
it possible for
this deal to
happen.’
DONALD TRUMP,
U.S. President, arguing
Aug. 3 that the U.S.
Treasury should get “a
substantial portion” of
the money if TikTok is
sold to a U.S. companyWORLD
TikTok on the
chopping block
By Charlie Campbell/Shanghai