TikTok’s US lawsuit to fight ban cheered on by Chinese state media

Posted by Admin May 8, 2024 Tech

China Daily, which is operated by the Communist Party, used a recent move supportive of electric vehicle maker Tesla to argue that China is more open to foreign business than the US.

China may soon allow Tesla to test robotaxis in the country, China Daily reported on Wednesday. The move “again demonstrates the Chinese government’s positive stance on opening further” to foreign business, while the US is showing signs of “rising trade protectionism”, the newspaper said.

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Chinastarmarket.cn, an online publication affiliated with the Shanghai government, also praised TikTok’s determination to overturn a law that some see as an existential threat to the app, as the US is its largest market. The challenge is “a fight with its back to the river”, the news outlet wrote, using a Chinese idiom that describes a make-or-break situation.

US government scrutiny of TikTok, a regular feature of Washington for years now, rapidly escalated in March when the company was caught off guard by a new bill that the House passed and later tied to US$95-billion in foreign aid, including funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, before sending it to the Senate. President Joe Biden signed it into law on April 24.

The law gives ByteDance 270 days – until January 19, 2025 – to find a buyer for the app. If it does not divest, Apple’s App Store and Google Play will be forced to remove it.

The Chinese tech giant has tapped American law firm Covington & Burling to fight the law. The firm helped block a statewide TikTok ban in Montana last year.

In 2021, Covington & Burling represented Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi in challenging the US Department of Defense’s designation of the company as a “communist Chinese military company”, which would have blacklisted it from US financial markets. An agreement to remove Xiaomi from the list was reached within four months.

This is the first serious legislative effort to ban TikTok in the US. The last significant attempt was in 2020, when then-president Donald Trump issued executive orders on the ByteDance app and Tencent Holdings’ WeChat.

China’s Ministry of Commerce has repeatedly said that it would oppose a forced sale of TikTok, the first Chinese app to find major success overseas. In 2020, Beijing updated its rules governing exports to include technology that likely covers the recommendation algorithms that drive TikTok’s success.

A divestiture “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”, TikTok and ByteDance wrote in their legal petition.