The Federal Communications Commission today gave China Telecom 60 days to shut down its operations in the United States. It acted because of an increasingly strong consensus in the U.S. that every Chinese company that touches American data is using it against the interests of the United States. It’s the same reason the Trump Administration put the squeeze to Huawei, the leading purveyor of 5G wireless technology. And it’s the same reason the U.S.government could act soon against DJI, the major Chinese maker of drones.
Slowly and gradually, the American government is waking up to the enormity of China’s technological challenge. It has penetrated perhaps thousands of American IT systems, including cloud computing systems that are marketed as being extremely safe. The Chinese party-state apparatus, which is increasingly fused into a single monolith, is attempting to leapfrog American and Western companies with products they cannot compete against.
This is happening at the same time that the Chinese are imposing greater pressures on U.S. companies operating in China to toe the government’s propaganda line. The decision by LinkedIn, a unit of Microsoft, to withdraw from China because of censorship issues, is a case in point. So is the Chinese retaliation against the NBA for a player’s “Free Tibet” shoes and comments.
We don’t know yet how far this technology decoupling is going to go. I think it has to go far enough that we can secure our systems. And that means we have to act against Zoom and TikTok. They may be incorporated as companies in California, but those are just fronts for Chinese parent companies that designed the algorithms and control the data these companies have accumulated in spades. Hundreds of millions of Americans and other nationalities are using TikTok. It has taken the world by storm. And just like Zoom, it feeds data back to a surprisingly sophisticated Chinese data mining capability. If we are waking up to China’s surveillance state, why aren’t we taking on Zoom and TikTok?
