{"id":57630,"date":"2020-07-17T15:00:26","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=57630"},"modified":"2020-07-17T14:46:52","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T04:46:52","slug":"tiktok-is-a-political-football-of-beijings-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/tiktok-is-a-political-football-of-beijings-making\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok is a political football of Beijing\u2019s making"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is facing an existential crisis. By its own estimation, its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is set to lose US$6 billion after being kicked out of India. A decision on a ban in the United States, telegraphed for days by multiple US officials, is set to come \u2018in weeks, not months\u2019, according to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With its back to the wall, the company is throwing everything it can at staving off further bans around the world\u2014including in Australia, where last week even just one call for the app to be banned, first anonymously in the News Corp tabloids<\/a> and then publicly by National Party MP George Christensen<\/a>, caused a media frenzy. When asked about the app today, Prime Minister\u00a0Scott Morrison said<\/a> the federal government was taking a \u2018good look at it\u2019 and that if the app\u00a0presents a security risk \u2018we won’t be shy\u2019 about taking action.<\/p>\n

In response, the company has launched a large-scale media campaign to try to convince the public that they have nothing to fear from its links to the People\u2019s Republic of China. In the US, the company has hired an army of over 35 lobbyists\u2014including, the New York Times<\/em> notes<\/a>, \u2018one with deep ties to President Trump\u2019\u2014who have already conducted more than 50 meetings with congressional staff and lawmakers.<\/p>\n

Here in Australia, TikTok has enlisted the help of Thrive PR\u2014a communications agency that touts its expertise in helping Chinese brands enter the Australian market<\/a>\u2014to produce slick made-for-TV interviews of the company\u2019s executives reeling off expertly drilled talking points. A PR offensive is set to run for several weeks<\/a> with ads in print, digital outdoor and video platforms across the country.<\/p>\n

The campaign\u2019s slogan\u2014\u2018Don\u2019t make TikTok a political football\u2019\u2014is a shot across the bow at any skittish MPs who are weighing up whether a TikTok ban will pass the pub test. \u2018Millions<\/em> of people have made TikTok one of Australia\u2019s most loved<\/em> apps\u2019 the print ad emphasises<\/a>. (Translation: Woe betide any politician who pushes for a TikTok ban. It\u2019s a vote loser.)<\/p>\n

That blunt warning was splashed across various Australian newspapers this week in full-page ads and, if that wasn\u2019t obvious enough, was accompanied by a letter drop to every single federal MP from TikTok Australia General Manager Lee Hunter that sought to \u2018correct the record regarding a number of false claims that have been made about TikTok over recent weeks\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018Contrary to some claims, it is critical you understand that we are independent, and not aligned with any government, political party or ideology\u2019, Hunter informed MPs in his letter. \u2018TikTok is a privately owned company interested in helping our users make and share creative and fun videos.\u2019<\/p>\n

That may be what Australia\u2019s TikTok executives genuinely believe, but it\u2019s certainly not what their boss ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming thinks. In 2018, the company faced a different existential crisis. With the flick of a pen, the party-state suspended Jinri Toutiao, the company\u2019s news aggregator, and shut down Neihuan Duanzi, a popular app for sharing short videos, GIFs and jokes, making it abundantly clear to the company who ultimately calls the shots with its business.<\/p>\n

In response, Zhang published an open letter<\/a> in which he apologised for failing to respect the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s \u2018socialist core values\u2019 and for \u2018deviating from public opinion guidance\u2019\u2014one of the CCP\u2019s terms for censorship and propaganda.<\/p>\n

\u2018All along, we have placed excessive emphasis on the role of technology\u2019, Zhang wrote, \u2018and we have not acknowledged that technology must be led by the socialist core value system, broadcasting positive energy, suiting the demands of the era, and respecting common convention.\u2019<\/p>\n

The apology could not have been more abject and its message more clear: we know that we can\u2019t simply be a commercial operation; we know we have to work in concert with the goals of the party. Or, in Australian sporting parlance: when the CCP lobs a political football at you, you have no choice but to run with it.<\/p>\n

Whether TikTok Australia\u2019s executives know it or not, that sword of Damocles remains dangled over the heads of their bosses in Beijing, giving the CCP more leverage than it could possibly ever need over the highest valued tech start-up on the planet. It\u2019s what drove the company at the time to boost its army of censors by an extra 4,000 people (candidates with party loyalty were preferred<\/a>) and it\u2019s what continues to motivate ByteDance\u00a0 to conduct \u2018party-building\u2019 exercises inside the company<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Far from being \u2018independent, and not aligned with any government, political party or ideology\u2019, TikTok\u2019s parent company ByteDance literally has an internal communist party committee as part of its governance structure<\/a>. ByteDance employees regularly get together to study Xi\u2019s speeches and pledge loyalty to the party.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to read Chinese to realise any of this. Just take a look at this single photograph<\/a>. Yes, that\u2019s the company logo in the bottom right-hand corner of the PowerPoint presentation, and yes, that\u2019s a flag with the hammer and sickle on it hung up in the corner of the room. We\u2019re not in Silicon Valley anymore, folks.<\/p>\n

It is this very particular context that TikTok comes from and that it remains inextricably entangled with. It\u2019s also where TikTok user data is being sent. By TikTok\u2019s own admission, the company is still sending data back to Beijing. In an April blog post<\/a>, Chief Information Security Officer Roland Cloutier conceded that it is the company\u2019s \u2018goal\u2019 to \u2018minimize\u2019 access to TikTok user data by employees in the PRC. That\u2019s hardly watertight.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s at this point that critics of companies like ByteDance point to the suite of national security laws<\/a> that give the party-state extraordinary powers to compel anyone to hand over any data it desires. It\u2019s an important point, but ultimately a moot one. In the PRC, the law is whatever the CCP decides it is.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not exactly subtle about it either. The CCP leads everything in Chinese society, says Xi<\/a>: \u2018Government, the military, society and schools, north, south, east and west\u2014the party leads them all.\u2019 Chinese citizens, he says, are like \u2018stars revolving around the revered moon<\/a>\u2019 of the CCP.<\/p>\n

As Beijing\u2019s power grows, the rest of the world is starting to look more like obstinate stars that are stubbornly refusing to orbit the revered moon of the CCP. One only has to look at how Beijing reacted when Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team, dared to post his own opinion on an app that\u2019s blocked in the PRC<\/a> to understand how seriously the CCP takes shaping the narrative outside its borders on issues it considers matters of national security.<\/p>\n

TikTok Australia\u2019s \u2018big goal\u2019, according to its general manager<\/a>, \u2018is to truly embed TikTok at the heart of Australian culture\u2019. Once it\u2019s fully embedded, does he really<\/em> believe the CCP won\u2019t be tempted to use that conduit to its own advantage?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is facing an existential crisis. By its own estimation, its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, is set to lose US$6 billion after being kicked out of India. A decision on a ban …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":714,"featured_media":57631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2212,1383,2545],"class_list":["post-57630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia-china-relations","tag-ccp","tag-tiktok"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTikTok is a political football of Beijing\u2019s making | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/tiktok-is-a-political-football-of-beijings-making\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"TikTok is a political football of Beijing\u2019s making | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Chinese video-sharing app TikTok is facing an existential crisis. 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