🇨🇳 China: Tick Tock, TikTok...

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🚦It’s definitely, mostly, probably, maybe, (not yet) banned.

By all measures, TikTok’s global success has been stratospheric, meteoric, and other space-related metaphors (the company always like to refer to itself as a ‘rocket ship’). If you look at global user numbers, TikTok hit 1 billion active users in 2021, and has refused to announce new user numbers since. Depending on who you ask, revenue is somewhere between $11bn and $120bn. Say the word ‘TikTok’ and the average person conjures up images of dances, short-form video, and shopping on a livestream.

It is, arguably, the first Chinese, or perhaps even Asian, modern tech company that has a genuine global footprint amongst both users and advertisers. It is the most significant corporate and cultural success story of the last five years. It’s become a source of discovery of culture and shopping for an entire generation.

All this success has come at a time when the pre-eminent global superpower (United States) has seen it’s influence threatened by the challenger (China). Suddenly, the viral dance trends seem a lot more sinister to the Americans.

TikTok says it has 170M users in the United States, and supports free-speech and commerce. The U.S. says they cannot allow a foreign-owned company to speak directly and actively to so many U.S. citizens, and must therefore ban it (an argument that has rare bipartisan support). What does China say?

CHINA DAILY: TikTok farce has damaging repercussions [link]

📢 What China Daily is saying
The more measured, less provocative China Daily published a short editorial on the recent TikTok ban (and unban) this week. It is four paragraphs long and makes the argument that a TikTok that continues to operate in the U.S. the way it always has is the best outcome for everyone.

1. 📸 Visuals

A single image sits at the top of the article. Helpfully, the title to the image gives us all the information we need for understanding why it’s there and what it’s about. It’s the TikTok logo on a smartphone, silhouetted against a screen showing more logos of TikTok. It looks like someone did a Google image search of TikTok logos on their computer, pulled up a logo of TikTok on their phone, and then put one in front of the other to frame the photograph.

2. ✍🏽 Words

The words are, perhaps purposefully, reserved and polite. The tone used in the language throughout is one of calm. The focus of the editorial is on allowing the company to operate legally and freely in the United States. The writer mentions how the ‘resumption’ of TikTok following it’s temporary suspension is ‘good news’ for the ‘170 million users’ and ‘7 million small businesses’.

The main issue the writer expresses is with Donald Trump’s assertion that the company should be 50% American-owned, saying that it ‘may not be good for the market’. The writer goes on to argue (tactfully) that the reason for TikTok’s success in the U.S., which has played a ‘positive role’ there, has been due to the help of China-based parent company ByteDance. However, there’s no elaboration on this claim.

Finally, the ultimate argument - the loss of trust between users and TikTok, and international companies and the U.S. should a 50% sale of TikTok be mandated. The writer ends off with calling on the U.S. to provide free, fair, and just rules of engagement to operate a company in the U.S. market, hoping to avoid a lose-lose scenario.

Some words do stand out - the headline calls the whole situation a ‘farce’, with ‘damaging repercussions’. The article also mentions the ‘irrationality’ of the ban, coupled with the ‘popularity’ of the app. It calls the ‘forcing’ of a ‘flourishing’ social media app to sell 50% of it’s stake to be it’s ‘undoing’, asking the U.S. government to handle the situation with ‘prudence’ in a ‘nondiscriminatory’ way.

❓ What it means
China Daily’s opinion piece is very easy to read, understand, and really, there’s very little to disagree with. All the arguments made do not violently fly in the face of logic. Job done then?

Well, not quite. You see, the opinion piece is written from a specific perspective - that of legally and successfully operating a large company in the U.S. that has already been operating for years, creating jobs, entertaining users, and growing small businesses. What’s wrong with that? Obviously, nothing. But it also conveniently skips over the main reason why the ban was called for to begin with (and the reason why the app is banned in India) - geopolitical competition that goes beyond a single company.

By removing any mention of the underlying issues tied to the potential TikTok ban, and framing it purely as a scenario where a market is imposing uncompetitive sanctions on a successful company (that has achieved said success with the help of a Chinese parent company), the issue is economic competition, and nothing more.

⚠️ Why it matters
You know we live in a strange timeline when Chinese news media is promoting free market capitalism to the United States. I’m reminded of the DJ Khaled album title, ‘Suffering from Success’, which is basically the article’s description for TikTok’s current challenges. And let’s be honest, there is definitely some truth in that argument because if TikTok were not successful, nobody would care so much. Success garners scrutiny.

However, the article looks at the issue in complete isolation. TikTok’s potential ban is viewed as independent of anything else happening anywhere else in the world. There is no context - reading it alone feels like the U.S. wants to ban TikTok precisely because it is successful. Which makes the U.S. look like an economic bully.

China and the United States have never had a close political relationship. U.S. President Nixon visited China in 1972, ending 25 years of isolation. And while that happened before most TikTok users and employees were born, in political history it is just over 50 years ago - a blip. In the last half century, trade between the two nations has exploded, and China has manoeuvred itself into one of the world’s great powers, which in itself is a threat to American hegemony.

The message here is clear - let the market decide, as it already has.

GLOBAL TIMES: TikTok issue will serve as a barometer for US business environment [link]

📢 What Global Times is saying
The famously jingoistic Global Times offers a longer, and more potent editorial on the issue. It’s clear that the national security reasoning for the ban is held in utter contempt by the media. Once again, the overall message is the same for U.S. politicians - play fair in an open market and don’t ruin global trust.

1. 📸 Visuals

Once again, there is a single image at the top of the article. In it, we see a two TikTok logos. One is clear, with the logo and name of the app shown on a smartphone held in the dark, and behind it is a much larger, out of focus logo. It is simple and to the point.

2. ✍🏽 Words

While the visual doesn’t give us much to do, the text certainly does.

The first few paragraphs are spent establishing the economic, social, and cultural importance of TikTok. It starts out with a brief summary of what happened last week - TikTok going dark in the U.S. and then coming back to life a few hours later. It specifically calls out TikTok’s thanking of Trump for the reversal. Then, it follows on by explaining how happy users and small businesses were because TikTok was restored, sharing how some users ended up moving to another Chinese app called Rednote, or Xiaohongshu, in the interim.

Several phrases are used here which help to paint this picture: the temporary ban is portrayed as a move taken ‘under the guise of “national security”’, with ‘many Americans expressing their joy’ at TikTok’s return, considering their ‘emotional farewell videos’ on TikTok before their ‘collective rush’ towards Xiaohongshu, resulting in their ‘celebratory videos’ once TikTok was brought in from the dark. The first section of the article ends with how some users experienced ‘deep personal pain’ from the overnight ban, considering that they run their businesses on the platform, and it even quotes the Associated Press by saying how the ban showed how ‘unpopular’ it is amongst Americans.

At this point, the article takes a hard turn to a quote from Winston Churchill (of all people) about how the U.S. eventually makes the right choice. It then goes on to say how the debate around TikTok in the U.S. has shifted from “national security” to “how to gracefully keep TikTok in the U.S.”

The article admits that while the ban has progressed smoothly politically, users and businesses are not happy, concluding that ‘the trap some Americans have set for TikTok has ensnared them [Americans] instead.’ There’s no further elaboration on what this means.

The article continues to outline further protectionist examples that the U.S. has pursued recently, including the rejection of Japanese company Nippon Steel merging (read: buying) US Steel, and an earlier example from the French company Alstom (no details are shared about what happened here). The article criticises this administrative overreach, which it says are ‘causing interference with and suppression of foreign companies’, spooking the all important ‘global capital markets’.

The article concludes with the message that this approach has already eroded trust in the American market, and calls on the Trump administration to provide open and fair regulation for companies to engage with, which not only benefits the U.S., it also aligns with how the rest of the world expects the U.S. to behave.

❓ What it means
Global Times has very clearly outlined what they believe - the whole ‘national security’ argument (a phrase which they have put between quotes four out of the five times they’ve used it) is bogus. Simply put, the Americans are afraid of playing fair because, once again, TikTok is super successful.

There is a lot more overt criticism of the handling of the legislative issues around TikTok, even going so far as to criticise the U.S. for protectionist and isolationist moves it’s made towards companies from allies (Japan, France). Much ink is spent on underlining how much TikTok is beloved by Americans, both users and businesses, and how the U.S. would be shooting itself in the foot by banning the app, especially since the people of the U.S. disagree with the ban.

In many ways, the article portrays the issue through two lenses - one, that there is a fundamental disagreement between voters and elected officials, and two, there is a fundamental disagreement between the rest of the world and the U.S. In short, the article states that the TikTok ban is being considered only for the narrow, personal interests of the political class of the U.S. against the wishes of it’s own people, and against the global rules of free trade.

⚠️ Why it matters
Global Times has historically been viewed as an assertive news media. It was the home of notorious editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, one of the most popular opinion leaders in China, who was also a supporter of China’s ‘wolf warrior’ communication strategy (a term coined by Western media based off the hit 2015 Chinese film Wolf Warrior). You can guess what it means.

The Global Times has often been seen as a barometer of the range of official opinion within the Chinese government. Still, while the editorial here is more impassioned and opinionated than the one in China Daily, it still mostly follows the same themes.

The argument is viewed purely through the lens of free market capitalism. The security issue is dismissed as pure theatre, and the right thing to do is made obvious - let TikTok operate freely.

The Churchill quote is telling - it’s a quote from a historically respected non-American political leader about the good intentions of Americans. However, the article then contrasts this with what it considers to be the bad intentions of the U.S. with the calls for banning TikTok. For the Global Times, it’s a cognitive dissonance it cannot abide.

However, there is one part of the article that I feel works against their argument. At the point where they mention other companies that have been shut out of operating in the U.S., including Alstom and Nippon Steel, the article says that this is evidence of a more protectionist U.S. economic and foreign policy, and is not only detrimental to global trade, it also reflects badly on America’s global image and domestic economic health. My reading is that if the U.S. can shut out companies from their own allies from their local market, why does the Global Times believe that TikTok has any chance?

WHAT’S GOING ON? 

⛔ Protectionist policies do not mix with free market capitalism

In 2014, I got to spend two months in Shanghai as an international student. One evening, as all us foreign students were standing on the side of the historical Bund district on the edge of the Huangpu River that scythes through Shanghai, we looked in awe across the river towards the ultra-modern, neon soaked, glass and concrete tower skyline of Lujiazui. An Italian classmate of mine looked at me and said, ‘I don’t understand how this is a emerging economy. This has already emerged!’

I had two challenges while living in Shanghai. First, I always found it challenging to walk through the city’s famous Nanjing Road, Shanghai's pedestrian shopping district. I’d be approached by several touts hocking their wares at me, whether it was shoes, belts, watches, or anything else I would want. They obviously knew I wasn’t local, and would approach me speaking perfect English, and would be relentless. Once, after saying no to one such tout after he had offered me a brochure of items I could pick from, he exasperatingly asked me, ‘then what do you want??’

This is the correct exasperated question to ask: what does everybody want? I suspect that China wants TikTok to continue to operate and grow in the U.S. as it tremendously boosts China’s image amongst a younger generation of Americans. It’s a testament to the technological and commercial successes of the global rise of China.

For the Americans, TikTok’s success directly infringes on their own economic, cultural, and corporate success. They are viewing the situation through a zero-sum game lens. Could some of it be paranoia? Possibly. But also, if anybody knows how to use paranoia to succeed in the world, it is definitely the Americans.

As for TikTok? Well, considering how when I was there we tended to not actively talk up the company’s connection with China, I suspect they just want to be allowed to operate freely and grow their business. And if the arrival of major tech founders and CEOs at Trump’s inauguration is any indication, it looks like everyone will have to kiss the ring in order to do so.

Returning to my story, my second challenge in Shanghai was that I couldn’t use Google, Facebook, or most other tech platforms that I was openly and freely using literally everywhere else I lived or visited. The Great Firewall of China was a real thing, and I was reduced to using a VPN to access Google Hong Kong as an alternative just to check my Gmail and post my inane thoughts on Facebook. It literally felt like using two different internets, one of which I did not recognise.

China prevents major American tech giants from operating openly in China for many of the same reasons that the U.S. is touting as part of it’s TikTok ban - control over information, data sovereignty, and national security concerns. Would Chinese tech giants have been able to grow in the Chinese market if they were competing with their American contemporaries?

So what’s the solution here? Perhaps it’s what my Danish classmate in Shanghai told me when I asked him how he walked through Nanjing Road without being accosted by enthusiastic entrepreneurs.

‘Just tell them Wǒ búyào’, he said. ‘They’ll leave you alone.’

Whichever side of the equation you land on, remember that the truth, as always, is somewhere in between.

Read widely. Question thoroughly. Decide accordingly.

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Was this forwarded to you? Signpost is a free weekly newsletter analysing what the media says, what it means, and why it matters. It’s free to subscribe. Alternatively, you can add me on LinkedIn.