What China says about the TikTok furor in Washington

This isn’t the first time China has seen a frenzy over TikTok consuming Washington.

In 2020, former President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order that would have forced TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the popular app. But Beijing thwarted a takeover bid from American buyers by restricting technology exports. Last year, Montana lawmakers passed a ban on TikTok in the state, but the law was blocked by a federal judge before it could go into effect.

Now, US lawmakers are again trying to force ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, to give up control of the app. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 352-65 to approve a bill that would force ByteDance to sell or ban the app in the United States.

But the zeal has not yet led to a hyper-vigilant response from China’s leaders or retaliatory threats against American companies. Instead, officials in Beijing have rejected the bill but largely echoed widespread criticism of U.S. policy as unfair to China.

There are several reasons for their reluctance, experts say. Despite bipartisan support in the House of Representatives, it faces an uncertain fate in the Senate. Mr. Trump, the expected Republican presidential nominee, has said he opposes the bill despite his 2020 executive order against TikTok. And China has legal tools it could use to block any sales.

“China is not ready to outright pull the trigger on a large-scale retaliation against what the United States is doing,” said Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

TikTok has a major influence in the United States, especially among young people. It has an estimated 170 million users in the United States, up from 100 million in 2020. It has an even larger global footprint, with an estimated one billion users in 140 countries. ByteDance’s Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, had more than 600 million daily active users as of mid-2020, the last time these statistics were reported.

In Washington, lawmakers say Beijing could use TikTok to spread messages from the Chinese Communist Party or access sensitive data about TikTok’s American users.

President Biden has said he would sign the House bill if it reached his desk. But Mr. Trump’s opposition to the legislation has signaled to Beijing that it can keep its powder dry.

“Trump’s opposing position took the wind out of the sails of this bill, so there is reason for Beijing and ByteDance to believe that this issue will eventually go away,” said Kevin Xu, the US-based founder of Interconnected Capital, a hedge fund that invests in artificial intelligence technologies.

TikTok says it has taken steps to protect the data and privacy of American users. It has proposed a scheme to store US user data on domestic servers controlled by Oracle. But those efforts to address lawmakers’ security concerns have failed, leaving “absolutely no trust between TikTok and Washington at this point,” Mr. Xu said.

Despite years of investigation, a Chinese company still owns TikTok. And even if lawmakers in Washington agree to force a sale, officials in Beijing have warned in the past that such a transaction would require their approval.

In 2020, as a sale of TikTok to US investors including Oracle and Microsoft seemed imminent, the Chinese government asserted its authority over exports it deemed sensitive; experts believe those rules include technology like the algorithm that powers TikTok. The move effectively scuttled attempts to put TikTok into the hands of American owners.

The export controls mean China could block sales of what makes TikTok so addictive: the powerful algorithm that gauges users’ interests to serve them video after video.

Within China, the belief among academics and commentators is that Beijing would not allow ByteDance to sell this technology to a foreign company.

Any sale of TikTok without the core algorithm would leave a potential buyer with a much less attractive product, Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said on Chinese social media platform Weibo in a statement. after on Thursday it was viewed 184,000 times.

The Chinese state-controlled media circulated rack Thursday by the State Department, which cited TikTok’s treatment as evidence of the United States’ “double standards” in protecting free speech. On Chinese social media platforms, which are censored, pressure in Washington has fueled outrage over the treatment of Chinese companies.

On Weibo this week, ‘TikTok fights back’ became a trending topic the platform urged its users to mobilize against the bill of the House of Representatives. Many commentators characterized the bill as theft and questioned Washington’s commitment to free market competition. They also worried that the bill could be a template that Washington could use against other Chinese-owned tech companies.

“Can we really do business this way?” asked Shen Yi, a cyberspace governance scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. Washington wielded the concept of national security as a weapon “towards any company from any country, saying, ‘Sell it or find other companies to work with, it’s for your own good’.” Mr. Shen said.

At a news briefing on Friday, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, demurred when asked about the latest developments in Washington’s TikTok frenzy. “Yesterday we answered questions about TikTok,” he said.

Olivia Wang contributed research from Hong Kong.