ByteDance has already been repeatedly forced to bend the knee to party authority at home. These CEOs probably want nothing to do with Chinese foreign policy.Īt the end of the day, however, there is very little that these firms can do to push back in a party-state environment. For them, to compete against Western firms overseas-as TikTok has succeeded in doing-is a natural evolution after saturating a domestic market. (For instance, Zhang’s posts on the microblogging platform Weibo from the early 2010s positively contrasted America’s freedom of speech with restrictions in China.) Many spent years in Silicon Valley or worked for top American tech firms in China, as Zhang did after graduate school for Microsoft. These founders were promised a China opening to the West and were all active online back when the Chinese internet was much more open than it is today. He is part of a group of nerdy software engineers who are much more liberal and open to the west than their forebears. But ByteDance is run by a new generation of leaders with a very different relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).īyteDance CEO Zhang Yiming, just 38, is this cohort’s leading man. Huawei’s CEO Ren Zhengfei, while certainly inspired by American managerial thinking, served in the People’s Liberation Army and modeled much of his mindset on Mao Zedong, framing Huawei’s expansion as a point of national pride. But there is an important generational split between TikTok and Huawei. In discussing the potential dangers of technology from China, Americans often lump TikTok together with Huawei-imagining these companies as run by faithful party members toiling ceaselessly to spread Xi Jinping Thought. But if the government were intent on pressuring ByteDance to help with some kind of interference abroad, the company has little wiggle room. So do American politicians' concerns over TikTok have any merit, or is this just an instance of overblown fearmongering? ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, has a more complicated relationship with the Chinese government than many American critics may realize. government action will be unfounded and discriminatory. In response, TikTok has claimed independence from the Chinese government and argued that any U.S. In doing so, the president is responding to legislators'and policymakers’ worries about the Chinese government using the app as a vector for espionage and election interference, perhaps through tweaking the TikTok’s algorithm to favor or disfavor videos supporting one candidate or another. operations from the app’s parent company, ByteDance. After President Trump announced that he was considering “banning” the popular video-sharing app, Reuters reported that the administration has given Microsoft a 45-day deadline to finalize an acquisition of TikTok’s U.S.
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