A congressional effort to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from exploiting TikTok’s popularity in the United States “will eventually backfire,” according to a prominent Chinese diplomat.
“In recent years, though the U.S. has never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to the U.S.’s national security, it has never stopped going after TikTok,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Wednesday. “Such practice of resorting to hegemonic moves … sabotages the normal economic and trade order in the world and will eventually backfire on the U.S. itself.”
House lawmakers voted to ban TikTok from the U.S. unless ByteDance, the Chinese tech company behind the popular application, sells the social media platform. The bill garnered 352 votes from a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers despite the unexpected opposition of former President Donald Trump and a last-minute political messaging campaign by TikTok itself — which the proponents of the legislation touted as evidence of the dangers posed by having such an app under China’s control.
“It does not apply to American companies. It only applies to companies subject to the control of foreign adversaries [as] defined by Congress,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who chairs the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said Wednesday on the House floor. “And it cannot, cannot, be used to censor speech. It takes no position at all on the content of speech, only foreign adversary control — foreign adversary control of what is becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30.”
The bill passed just days after the unveiling of a U.S. Intelligence Community survey of global threats that cast TikTok as a component of China’s growing efforts to replicate the foreign influence operations that Russia has put into operating in recent years.
“Beijing’s growing efforts to actively exploit perceived U.S. societal divisions using its online personas move it closer to Moscow’s playbook for influence operations,” the U.S. Intelligence Community report said. “China is demonstrating a higher degree of sophistication in its influence activity, including experimenting with generative Al. TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022.”
The finding is emblematic of a wider distrust of technology that China might choose to use for data collection, surveillance, or influence operations. Hours before House lawmakers cast their votes, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that U.S. officials would require “very significant controls and conditions around the software and sensors in” Chinese electric vehicles before allowing them to operate in the U.S.
“Because at the end of the day, we must protect the American people from the threat that China poses,” she said while traveling in the Philippines. “It doesn’t matter if those cars are made in Mexico or Beijing.”
Chinese law empowers security agencies to compel companies under their jurisdiction to share information with the regime, an authority that U.S. officials say raises the risk that Chinese officials will have access to the data that ByteDance collects through the TikTok app.
“Americans need to understand that distinctions that we take for granted in our system between businesses and government, between the businesses and the government itself don’t exist for all practical purposes in China,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House panel on Tuesday. “So Americans need to ask themselves whether they want to give the Chinese government the ability to control access to their data … the ability to leverage the data, the software on their devices, which allows the Chinese government to compromise their devices if they so choose to exercise.”
TikTok officials hope the House bill will run aground in the Senate, where Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) regards Gallagher’s bill as a “draconian measure that stifles free expression” and harms U.S. businesses that use TikTok.
“With an iron fist, Congress dictated an unrealistic and narrow path for divestment, effectively banning TikTok and ignoring its substantial investments in data security,” Paul said Wednesday.
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Wang, the Chinese diplomatic spokesman, maintained that Raimondo and other U.S. officials are “fabricating excuses” to oppose Chinese interests.
“Hyping up the so-called China threat to data security is nothing but fabricating excuses to justify the U.S.’s acts of suppressing China,” he said. “We hope the U.S. will take concrete actions to safeguard an open, just, and nondiscriminatory business environment and work with others to formulate universal data security rules and make positive contribution[s] to the orderly and free data flows around the world.”
