Washington: In response to reports that the Biden administration will demand that TikTok be sold, China has urged the US government to stop "abusing state power" and "suppressing related businesses," indicating Beijing's growing dissatisfaction with Washington's position on its technology sector.
At a routine press conference on Thursday, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, stated that the US had not provided any evidence to support the claim that TikTok poses a threat to US national security and that Washington should stop disseminating "false information" regarding data security.
The remarks followed news that Washington had demanded that TikTok's Chinese owners sell the application or risk having it banned in the country, a demand that was eerily similar to one made by then-US President Donald Trump two years prior.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), according to a spokesperson for TikTok named Brooke Oberwetter, had recently demanded that the Chinese owners of the app sell their shares or risk having the video app banned in the US.
Because a change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access, divestment doesn't address the issue if safeguarding national security is the goal, according to Oberwetter of TikTok.
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After Beijing intervened and stated that prior government approval was required before the export of domestic algorithms, a 2020 deal to sell the app fell through. The executive order issued by the Trump administration was also contested by TikTok in US courts, and TikTok was later permitted to continue operating in the US by the Biden administration.
Analysts predict that Beijing and the owners of TikTok will again oppose the latest US demand for a change in ownership.
Although TikTok is still widely used in the US, political scrutiny has grown due to worries about data security and possible connections to Chinese authorities. Early in March, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a bill that would grant US President Joe Biden the authority to outlaw the app nationally if he so chose.
TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, has not commented on the most recent US effort to compel an ownership change.
Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, where its sibling app Douyin has more than 600 million daily active users, do not offer TikTok. After a border dispute with China in 2020, India blocked TikTok, citing a law that permits the government to block websites and apps when the nation's "sovereignty and integrity" are at risk.
In an effort to allay growing concerns from some US lawmakers about the app's data security and ties to the Chinese government, TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi, a Singaporean based in Singapore, will testify at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee later this month.
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According to a statement from the time, when Trump demanded that ByteDance sell TikTok in 2020, the Chinese company brokered a deal to sell minority equity stakes in TikTok Global to other investors while ByteDance kept an 80% equity stake.
Although ByteDance would not transfer any proprietary algorithms or technologies to the US company, under that deal—which was later dropped—ByteDance would have permitted potential stakeholder Oracle Corp to perform security checks on TikTok's source code.
