TikTok is targeted in the US for being Chinese, not for what it has or has not done

National security concerns cited by Washington are tenuous at best – but then again, TikTok was never going to be treated equally to American platforms
The US propensity to regard anything China-related with suspicion will make life much harder for Chinese living in the US

Leo Yu

Published: 1:00am, 26 Mar 2023

Why you can trust SCMP

What is the problem with TikTok? The US Congress unequivocally answered this question through a five-hour grilling on Thursday: it is China.

Let’s face it, the national security concern about TikTok appears to be tenuous at best. At the hearing where TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi was questioned by US lawmakers, the only incident raised that can remotely support this concern is one in which some employees at TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including two reporters. ByteDance acknowledged the wrongdoing and swiftly fired the responsible employees.

Nobody, including the US government, has alleged that the involved employees leaked the information of the American reporters to the Chinese government. To date, there is no public evidence that Beijing has harvested TikTok’s commercial data for intelligence or other purposes.

Nevertheless, this story has become a Chinese spy story. “China” appears 13 times in a Forbes report flashily titled, “EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied on Forbes Journalists”. This story evidently led to a US Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation.

Such an incident would probably not trigger a DOJ investigation if the company involved had no ties to China. As some Congress members have admitted, the gathering of user data is not exclusive to TikTok. Data collection is a baseline business strategy for many, if not all, social media platforms.

TikTok’s trouble is not data collecting or the mishandling of it. It is in trouble because of its original sin: it is owned by the Chinese.

02:32

US lawmakers grill TikTok CEO on app’s alleged ties to Chinese Communist Party

To many Americans, nothing positive can come from China. The Chinese were the odd-looking, cheap labourers in the 1800s and 1900s, and unfair competitors who took away blue-collar American jobs in the late 1900s and early 2000s. Now, they are helpers of the Communist Party of China, which, according to many US politicians, intelligence officials and ordinary Americans, has become the No 1 enemy of America.

President Xi Jinping’s meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, to discuss Ukraine and other topics, adds fuel to this fire of suspicion. Thus, a Chinese engineer’s mishandling of Americans’ data is, by default, a national security concern, since this engineer is believed to have unquestionable ties to the Communist Party.

Such a mentality has hurt many Chinese living in America, including Chinese Americans. The Justice Department’s failed China Initiative was based on this mentality, leading to the racial profiling of scientists of Chinese descent, and may have significantly harmed research collaborations.

Chinese are seen as unintelligent people who cannot think independently, which makes them victims of Communist Party brainwashing and subject to its control. Somehow a Republican who opposes the January 6 insurrection or a southerner who condemns slavery can be true Americans. But a Chinese apparently cannot distinguish themself from their government and political party. This is orientalism in the 21st century.

TikTok’s original sin will determine its fate in America. The US government will not treat it equally to other platforms. During the hearing, Republican representative Jay Obernolte told TikTok’s Chew, a Singaporean, that “you are not trusted here”.

Democratic congressman Tony Cárdenas told him, “You remind me a lot of Mark Zuckerberg”. However, Zuckerberg and Facebook have never been so closely scrutinised by Congress.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a hearing about data privacy on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, on April 11, 2018. Photo: AP

Facebook’s association with Cambridge Analytica’s data collection, which was found to have been used to influence voters in the 2016 US election, did not lead to a bipartisan momentum to shut it down, despite Zuckerberg’s acknowledgement that the company did not do enough to curb misinformation and foreign interference in American elections.

Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, has acknowledged that its hosts promoted false narratives during the 2020 US election. Few people, however, have labelled Fox News a national security concern and the DOJ has not initiated an investigation of the network.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s competitors have played up its original Chinese sin. TikTok has been dominating the social media market and has been the most downloaded app in the world for two years. Reels, launched by Meta to compete with TikTok, is hardly thriving. Since 2022, Meta has reportedly invested significant resources to create a national campaign against TikTok.

Since then, TikTok has become a target. Concerns about it range from national security to unhealthy internet use by American teenagers. Other platforms, such as YouTube and Twitter, have been suspiciously quiet during this debacle. The bipartisan position against TikTok is not a coincidence; it appears to be a textbook example of corporate America’s strong lobbying power.

03:50

TikTok influencers rally against potential US ban

TikTok probably will be banned eventually, because this is a rare bipartisan consensus, and nobody wants to be labelled as soft on China in today’s political atmosphere. The tenuousness of the national security concern will not save TikTok. The Chinese have a proverb: he who has a mind to beat his dog will easily find his stick.

Chinese living in America should be on alert. There has never been a clear line between a foreign country and immigrants from that country. Anti-China sentiment is likely to make life harder for these residents of America, and they could risk becoming collateral damage in a clash between China and the United States.

In many states, Chinese people already feel the burn: several state legislatures are enacting laws to ban Chinese from owning property. Texas state senators have proposed a bill that would forbid public universities from admitting Chinese students. These proposed laws strike the same chord as a TikTok ban: “we do not trust the Chinese and they will never be one of us”.

Leo Yu is a clinical professor of law at the Dedman School of Law, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas