TikTok ban is still ‘fair game,’ says expert on Chinese business and government

It’s been a whiplashing January for TikTok and the app’s more than 100 million U.S.-based users.

Just days before a national ban was slated to go into effect, the company failed in its last-ditch effort to appeal against the law, as the Supreme Court decided in favor of the U.S. government. Even though the law merely restricted the app from being listed on app stores, on Jan. 19 TikTok barred U.S. users from the platform wholesale.

Yet scarcely 12 hours later, TikTok pressed play on its services again.

In a statement explaining its return to operation, the company’s CEO, Shou Chew, cited comments from Donald Trump in which the president indicated he would work to reverse the ban after taking office the next day.

Given the rapid developments—which have involved all three branches of government and have spanned two presidencies—TikTok’s fate remains far from certain.

The turmoil has raised questions about the relationship between the U.S. and China, including for many TikTok users who might not otherwise have paid much attention to the geopolitical tensions.

UC San Diego Today spoke with professor Victor Shih, director of the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy’s s 21st Century China Center, to learn more about why TikTok has faced so much scrutiny in the U.S., as well as what implications a ban could have for relations between the two countries.

What’s the relationship between TikTok and the Chinese Communist Party?

TikTok is a private company, and it’s now registered offshore from China—but, of course, historically most of its operation has been in China. As of five or six years ago, maybe even a bit longer, the Chinese government has required large, private companies to have branches of the Chinese Communist Party within the company structure.

For the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, Douyin, there’s a party committee in the company. And the parent company, ByteDance, which is located in China, also has a Chinese Communist Party branch. Most of the people in the party committee would not be full-time government officials—they’re just workers or executives who had already belonged to the party. That’s actually a common thing to happen. You will soon be recruited into the party at a university or in the workplace, and a lot of people do it just to advance their careers.

There are certain requirements for joining the party, and the No. 1 requirement is that you have to obey the party no matter what. I think that’s where a lot of U.S. lawmakers and people in the government really have an issue.

More recently, within the past four years, the party has demanded top tech companies to give part of their shares to entities of the Chinese government. So China has sovereign wealth funds. Through that mechanism, the government becomes a minority shareholder of these tech companies, so then it can send members to the management boards of these tech companies, and these board members are full-time Chinese government officials.

How has this relationship between ByteDance and the party played into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s larger goals?

Xi Jinping recognizes the power of social media and the internet in general—not really as something to control people’s minds with, but certainly something to use to sway people’s opinions. He has ordered internet companies in China to work for the party on behalf of the party. It’s very well known that the Chinese counterpart of TikTok is ordered by the Chinese government to convey propaganda to users within China all the time, even if TikTok claims that it doesn’t do that for audiences outside of China.

Xi has also said that he wants users around the world, not just in China, to use Chinese technology. And of course, TikTok has been the most successful case of this, certainly on the software side: it’s used by over a billion users worldwide.

Is there reason for the U.S. to be legitimately concerned about how TikTok might make users’ personal data available to the Chinese government?

I don’t buy the argument that we should be alarmed how the Chinese government can get all this data on users from TikTok—because all the other internet platforms active in the U.S. already sell user data to data brokers, and China can obtain it that way. To be clear, I’m sure TikTok is feeding some data to the Chinese government; I’m just saying that it’s probably not that much worse than what they could do already using all the other sources of data.

The other worry is that TikTok is so powerful, and that it’s used by so many people that the people behind the app can bias the politics within the United States. I think that TikTok does have the potential to do that. But then, compare that with other people who are influencing opinion on social media. You have to ask yourself, “Who has done more damage to the quality of American democracy: Elon Musk or TikTok?”

Is the ban a wise move? How could it affect relations between the two countries?

It’s really difficult to assess because former government officials, sometimes at 21st Century China Center events, will say, “If only you knew what we knew, you would definitely support the ban.” But we don’t know what they know.

One consideration is that the Chinese government has banned pretty much all of our social media and search platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Google.

From a pure competitive technology perspective: I don’t think the ban is optimal, but at least it’s fair game. But of course, TikTok has great currency in the United States: people make a living off of TikTok, so a ban is going to affect them, and as a result, for domestic political reasons it may not be the smartest thing to do.