Tikked Off by TikTok?
by John Lawrence, August 4, 2020
The latest salvo in Trump's Cold War Against China is his insistence that market economics are passe. Trump is interfering in the free market economy in order to penalize a Chinese corporation that evidently has outcompeted its American counterparts. TikTok, beloved by American teenagers, is a social media app. It is now being banned from the US by an American President. Free speech? Only applies to Americans within America in very limited circumstances. For instance, you can't pass out fliers on private property. The New York Times says that TikTok is known for "hosting short videos where teenagers, celebrities and creators often dance or lip-sync to viral audio clips. It all seems innocuous, fun and sometimes even silly."
TikTok may be innocuous and silly, but it is a threat to Facebook and other US based apps which are losing market share to TikTok. This is all reminiscent of Trump's tirade against Huawei going as far as to sanction any country bold enough to defy American wishes and do business with them. Trump's trumped up charges include that TikTok has a "backdoor" which allows the nefarious Chinese Communist government to snoop or even to do other nefarious things like plant viruses or interfere in American elections. There is absolutely no evidence of any kind that there is any such backdoor or that the Communist Chinese government has any ability whatsoever to control or interfere with TikTok's operations. TikTok is owned by a Chinese corporation - ByteDance.
The US government, probably also including a future Biden administration, is very worried that China Inc. is in the process of outcompeting America Inc. China is pulling ahead of the US both in terms of its economy and in terms of its influence in the world. Ironically, China is outcompeting the US because China is, at least economically, a capitalist nation. It may have a different form of capitalism than does the US, but it is capitalist nonetheless. Politically it may be communist, but economically it is capitalist which brings up the conundrum that most countries of the world are competing and interacting in a worldwide capitalist economic system. This presents a major problem for the US government which is resorting to throwing roadblocks in the way of companies which are outcompeting American companies.
There are problems regarding the US-China relationship which should be ironed out by diplomacy. Instead the Trump administration shoots from the hip and bases its foreign policy on Trump's whims and prognostications. Trump doesn't need verifiable data to indicate the nature of reality. He just shoots from the hip as if whatever pops into his head represents the actual state of affairs in the real world. The US is making a big mistake. The climate change crisis, not to mention the coronavirus pandemic, requires that the major countries of the world cooperate, not antagonize each other. Kishore Mahbuboni, author of "Has China Won?" writes:
Of the world's three largest democracies, two are Asian: India and Indonesia. Neither the Indian nor Indonesian democracies feel threatened in any way by Chinese ideology. Neither do most European democracies feel threatened. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is not trying to challenge or threaten American ideology. By treating the new China challenge as akin to the old Soviet strategy, America is making the classic strategic mistake of fighting tomorrow's war with yesterday's strategies. Are American strategic thinkers capable of developing new analytical frameworks to capture the essence of the competition with China?
Evidently not. The US needs a new paradigm to justify spending a trillion dollars a year on its military-industrial complex. Therefore, it needs to gin up tensions with China and/or Russia. Instead of using diplomacy to try and create peace and cooperation in the world, the US, at least under Pompeo and Trump, do their best to increase tension and rivalry. Let's hope that the Biden administration will take a different approach. If they don't, the work that needs to be done with respect to climate change will go by the wayside, and the earth probably will not be inhabitable for future generations.
