China will not accept the “theft” of a Chinese technology company and is able to respond to the Trump administration’s move to push ByteDance to sell short-video app TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft, the Chinese Communist Party state-run China Daily said on Tuesday.
The United States’ “bullying” of Chinese tech companies was a consequence of Washington’s zero-sum vision of “American first” and left China no choice but “submission or mortal combat in the tech realm”, the state-backed paper said in an editorial. China had “plenty of ways to respond if the administration carries out its planned smash and grab”, it added.
Microsoft Corp said on Monday it was in talks with ByteDance to buy parts of TikTok after U.S. President Donald Trump reversed course on a plan to ban the app on national security grounds and gave the firms 45 days to strike a deal.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said over the weekend that Trump would take action shortly against Chinese software companies that shared user data with the Chinese government.
The Global Times newspaper, which is also government-backed, said U.S. treatment of ByteDance and Huawei Technologies, now on a U.S. trade blacklist, was indicative of U.S. efforts to separate its economy from China’s.
President Trump’s remark over the weekend that he was weighing an outright ban of TikTok in the U.S. sparked nationalist sentiments in China, where the Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, derided the situation as “the hunting and looting of TikTok by the U.S. government in conjunction with U.S. high-tech companies.”
On Chinese social media, users likewise expressed outrage. Many on the Twitter -like Weibo platform accused the Trump administration of pandering to voters by stemming the rise of TikTok—and by extension, China.
On Douyin, Bytedance’s domestic analogue to TikTok, where videos commenting on a possible U.S. ban circulated widely, one popular comment suggested Huawei be allowed to buy Apple Inc.’s China operations.
MacDailyNews Take: Former U.S. President Richard Nixon, who opened relations with China in the early 1970’s, just before his death in 1994: We may have created a Frankenstein.
Apple cannot divest their dependence on China quickly enough (because they started years too late).
It’s smart for both Apple and Foxconn to diversify assembly outside of China. There’s no sense having all of your eggs in one basket. — MacDailyNews, April 2, 2019