BEIJING: The U.S. government recently coerced ByteDance to sell video-sharing app TikTok’s U.S. business to American companies, repeating its old trick of seizing high-tech enterprises by abusing state power.
Media and experts pointed out that the United States used the pretext of national security to carry out coercive transactions, which has seriously undermined market principles and international rules, and exposed its unabashed hegemony, setting a bad precedent in the international community.
In recent months, the U.S. government threatened to shut down TikTok’s operations in the United States, and then forced it to sell itself to American companies. International commentators and scholars have used similar words — robbery, extortion and heisting — to describe the nature of the U.S. coercion over TikTok. The Australian Financial Review published an article, saying that the U.S. acts have politicized the business issue, and mingled national security together with personal political interests.
The analysts said that in the battle over TikTok, the U.S. administration set a precedent of creating an unstable playing field for companies doing business in the country. Actually, the United States has repeatedly suppressed foreign enterprises that challenged its leading position, even those in allied countries. In the 1980s, the United States suppressed Japan’s semiconductor industry represented by Toshiba by similar means.–Agencies
