It seems the war on China by United States will continue until the elections in November and if Donald Trump wins again then we are going to see another cold war, only this time it will not be Russia but USA and China. The war on Chinese tech companies is seen as a strategy of Trump to enhance US companies and destroy the viability of their counterparts in China because of balance of power in the tech world. Today Huawei, TikTok and ZTE are so big in the word that Trump can’t stomach them any longer but to make sure that they are either taken over by US citizens or shut down. But this is going to be a big fight that none of this country will win or loss, only the subscribers will feel the pinch.
Let’s look at TikTok, the wildly popular short video platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, that is in the US’ crosshairs due to alleged national security risks. Trump has threatened to ban the app completely, but there’s been a last-minute reprieve thanks to a potential deal with Microsoft for all TikTok’s business in the US. This aggression comes despite TikTok taking many steps to preemptively assuage concerns; including putting all its servers in the US to ensure data doesn’t leave the country. Evidently that’s not enough when there are political points to be scored.
In the absence of credible evidence for a threat, which no one in the US administration seems able to provide, oddly enough, people must assume the entire US case against TikTok rests on the app’s Chinese origin. It’s reminiscent of the campaign to discredit Huawei, where baseless rumblings over “national security” fueled nonstop smears against the tech company. No proof was provided, as usual. Yet some countries still pulled out of 5G development deals with Huawei, due to what was essentially a global game of Telephone.
Technology is part of the tug of war between the United States and China. But what I know in planet earth: When you hear an American technology executive mention China, put on your hmmmm face. Ditto when you hear a U.S. government official talk about China in the context of technology. U.S. tech companies love to suggest that anything that hurts them somehow opens the door to China’s technology dominance. And American politicians sometimes appear to fan fears of Chinese technology for selfish reasons.
I get a pain behind my eyes when a U.S. tech boss brings up China. “Breakup strengthens Chinese companies. This was what Mark Zukerberg told US Congressional hearing two years ago. This has been the case of all the American tech CEOs.
All of these tech giants are finding ways to discredit Chinese tech by telling the US government that the more pressure they put on their companies, the more space and advantage the Chinese tech companies have. The US administration, sadly, has some high-profile allies in this crusade, including leading Democrats like New York Senator Chuck Schumer. He has echoed Trump’s call for a ban, uncritically accepting the White House’s allegations without a second thought. So much for an opposition party joining the China-bashing that has been a bipartisan endeavor since 1949, but it’s gotten particularly bad in recent months.
That’s no accident. Through a media-industrial complex in complete lockstep with its agenda, the US has conjured up a narrative that no Chinese entity can be trusted. And with the US’ monopoly power in key industries and labor sectors, as well as the dollar’s place as the world’s reserve currency, other countries have no choice but to go along. This is a longstanding practice, and isn’t limited to China or tech. Just ask French energy and transport company Alstom, which was partially bought by the US’ General Electric in 2015 amid a relentless investigation by the Department of Justice. With that track record, it’s no surprise Trump feels confident in making TikTok an “offer it can’t refuse.” Declaring the app will be banned if it isn’t sold to a US company forces everyone’s hand, and likely shrinks the price to a fraction of TikTok’s actual value. So Microsoft or some other oligarch gets one of the world’s top social media sites for peanuts, and a Chinese competitor gets choked out of the US entirely. It’s a protection racket on an international scale.
And since we’re already having this conversation, why don’t we examine the behavior of the US’ own tech multinationals? Their coziness with US intelligence organs deserves renewed scrutiny now that TikTok has been made out to be a uniquely pernicious threat. How quickly we forget the role of Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, in the National Security Agency’s PRISM data-gathering program. Or Amazon’s $600 million cloud computing deal with the Central Intelligence Agency. Or Google’s early funding through CIA and FBI research grants, and Microsoft regularly surrendering user data for “foreign intelligence” investigations.
Strange, isn’t it, that TikTok receives such ire over wholly unproven claims while far more powerful US companies face no consequences for very real, very disturbing practices. Americans should be wondering why their government has yet to go after any of these tech leviathans the way it has a simple video app. But they probably know the answer: Professional courtesy. Going back to 2016 elections in the U.S., Trump on the campaign trail railed against China accusing it of pulling off “one of the greatest thefts in the history of the world” and “raping” the US economy. Trump repeated the word China so often it spawned a viral video of him saying it over and over again. The attacks were a hit with voters and helped get him elected. He has continued lambasting China – to cheers – at rallies ever since.
After the elections, Trump called China’s president, Xi Jinping, “a good friend”. Now he is an “enemy”. How did we get here? The U.S. elections are back and Trump wants to use the same strategy of 2016 by attacking China telling the Americans that all their jobs have been stolen by the Chinese and that China and Iran are determine to hack the elections so that the Democrats will win. Diverting attention of the American people from Russia, and putting China on the spotlight of master hackers that will do all in their power to kick him out of office and install Biden whom he refers to as ‘sleeping Joe’.
But as Bloomberg have said he will spend his money to make sure that this strategy implored four years ago will not work this time as they have been telling the people that China is not their problem but Trump is, because both China and America can co exist and none can’t do without the other. For decades, the US peddled a utopian fantasy of the internet as the Wild West, a new frontier where information and speech was totally free. But that was always a lie, tainted with hypocrisy. It painted other countries’ internet policies as cruel and Orwellian while running its own highly sophisticated surveillance regime. And it used the immense resources and influence of its multinationals to create an economic behemoth, boasting unprecedented reach. With that absolute power these corporations crushed foreign competitors and swallowed up the world’s data, selling it to other companies and feeding it to spy agencies.
But now China, which rejected the US’ tech swindle to develop its own industry, is a rising player on the scene. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, with their material advantages and a multi-decade head start, can’t compete on a level playing field or are afraid to. And we know a fracturing of any US monopoly, even in a field as seemingly harmless as social media, would weaken the country’s global grip. This is, naturally, unacceptable for the capitalists who really run the show. So for TikTok, as with Huawei and ZTE, “Uncle Sam” has to step in.
Opposing China for purely political reasons is what United States is doing. Its persecution of Huawei is based on fear of competition. The so-called champion of the free world does not really believe in freedom; rather it believes in world domination by the US in all areas. Today many people in the West are getting fed a continuous diet of anti-Chinese propaganda in nearly all the media. It is disgusting hypocrisy. Most of these Western countries took centuries to reach where they are today, but for China it took them 70 years to arrive and surpass them.
The truth is that China is now ahead of the US in certain technologies such as 5G and face recognition. It would be difficult for the US to catch up. The faster way for the U.S. can do it is through “daylight robbery”, by forcing TikTok and later all other Chinese tech companies in the US such as WeChat and Tencent America to sell on the cheap to their US rivals.
By Austin Thomas