Yahoo Finance Not everything from China is a weapon
Amid the Chinese spy balloon saga, calls have grown louder in Washington, D.C., to ban TikTok, the huge social-media app owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance. It’s self-defeating opportunism that defies logic and showcases America’s own risk to itself.
Republican senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ken Buck of Colorado recently introduced a bill to ban the video-sharing app in the United States, arguing that it’s a national-security threat. They and others claim that China’s communist government could abuse the data collected on 94 million Americans who use the app or rig the platform’s algorithms to favor Chinese propaganda.
Congress forbade the use of TikTok on government-owned devices last year. Some state and local governments have done the same. Democratic Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores (so far, to no avail). Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia favors periodic reviews of certain foreign business offerings to clear them of national-security risk.
The U.S. relationship with China is tense, with politicians of both parties now baring teeth to prove they’re tough on China. But the law of political grandstanding holds that for every provocation there’s an equal and opposite overreaction, and some of the China protestations are pointless hyperventilating.
What’s missing is a rational distinction between what’s a threat and what is merely a product.
Despite all the talk of de-globalization and a U.S.-China cold war, China remains the single biggest source of American imported goods. Americans bought $537 billion worth of Chinese goods in 2022, just a tad less than the record imports of 2018. The biggest category of imports from China is electronics—everything from cheap alarm clocks to fancy TVs to iPhones. If the Chinese communist party can spy on Americans via TikTok, then it can certainly do the same through phones, computer gear, appliances, and maybe even baby monitors.
Is every gizmo from China a potential weapon? How much of them should we ban?
[Follow Rick Newman on Twitter, sign up for his newsletter or sound off.]
Many offerings from China—and many other countries—could be weaponized. That doesn’t mean they are. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology recently analyzed TikTok as a national security threat and found no evidence of risk to the app’s 94 million U.S. users or the United States as a whole. People with access to sensitive national security information could unwittingly disseminate it via TikTok. But that’s true of any social media app, and the researchers found nothing in TikTok’s algorithms or business structure that make it riskier than Twitter or Instagram.
“The attack on TikTok is really a kind of proxy war waged by a specific political faction in the U.S.,” the paper concludes. “This faction wants to fully decouple the U.S. and Chinese economies because it sees U.S.-China relations entirely as a zero-sum struggle for world dominance, and rejects peaceful co-existence. This faction can further its agenda by presenting any form of economic interaction with the Chinese economy as a national security threat. The attack on TikTok takes this logic to an absurd extent.”
That anti-China "faction" has grown quite large, especially as Chinese president Xi Jinping has steered his country toward more militant policies regarding Taiwan, disputed territories in the Pacific region and more overt confrontation with the west. Foreign Policy recently detailed how decades of engagement with China have now morphed into estrangement, with China hawks setting the agenda, sometimes unchallenged.
There's justification for the hardening U.S. attitude toward China. In addition to traditional spying, China runs a massive espionage program aimed at capturing American business secrets. It has stolen trillions of dollars’ worth of technology from U.S. and other western firms.
But applying the same level of suspicion to everything from China risks underplaying the real threats and hyping bogus ones. Huawei, the giant Chinese telecom company, could cause real damage if its products were integral to the functioning of U.S. infrastructure. That’s why the Trump and Biden administrations have put strict limits on U.S. dealings with Huawei. Eavesdropping TVs, by contrast, may be no more dangerous than web browsers or smart speakers trying to gain consumer data they can exploit to sell you more stuff.
Sen. Warner may have the right idea: Establishing a process for assessing the risks posed by imported products from frenemy nations, and only taking action when a threat materializes. If China does exert control over TikTok’s parent company, it could, in theory, begin posting propaganda on the app if there were a major confrontation, such as an invasion of Taiwan.
That could very well warrant a ban. But preemptive bans focused on everything that could become a threat, under certain circumstances, would be prohibitively disruptive, and force many Americans to empty their homes.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
Download the Yahoo Finance app for Apple or Android
Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, and YouTube
