US TikTok Ban Aims to Weaken China & Protect Big Tech Monopolies

By Ben Norton / Geopolitical Economy Report

The US government has for years threatened to ban TikTok, one of the most popular social media apps in the country.

It’s now looking like this might actually happen.

This March, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass legislation called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act”.

This bill states that it “prohibits distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)”.

It passed with an overwhelming majority of 352 votes in favor and just 65 votes against. It will now go to the Senate, where it is likely going to pass. And President Joe Biden has said he will sign the bill.

TikTok is not technically a Chinese company. It is based in Los Angeles, California, and also Singapore. The CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, is not Chinese; he is Singaporean.

Shou pointed this out many times when he was grilled in the US Senate by Republicans like Tom Cotton, who portrayed him as an agent of the Communist Party of China.

What the US government is trying to do with this legislation is force the owner of TikTok, the Chinese company ByteDance, to divest – and ideally sell TikTok to a US company.

If ByteDance refuses to sell its popular social media to its competitors, the US government will ban TikTok.

This is part of a technological war that Washington is waging against Beijing.

The US is essentially trying to block competition from Chinese tech companies, to protect Big Tech monopolies in Silicon Valley.

“Banning TikTok would boost Alphabet, Meta and Snap”, Forbes chirped excitedly in 2023. It noted that these “American technology giants could tack on some $431 billion in market value if the U.S. bans TikTok”.

For its part, Meta (which has tens of billions of dollars of contracts with multiple US government agencies) has spent years lobbying against TikTok.

The Washington Post reported in 2020, “Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok”.

To try to sabotage Chinese competition, the US is banning apps, imposing tariffs, and restricting exports – targeting Chinese electric vehicles, Chinese solar panels, advanced semiconductors, 5G tech, and smart phones, principally from cutting-edge companies like Huawei.

Washington’s goal is to prevent China from catching up technologically. And TikTok is only one part of this larger tech war.

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo made this clear as day back in 2021, stating, “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe”.

The US commerce secretary has since repeated comments like this multiple times.

This March, Raimondo said that the US will “do whatever it takes” to prevent China from getting access to the most advanced technology.

It’s not a coincidence that, also in March, President Biden called for an investigation into the so-called “national security risks” posed by Chinese electric vehicles.

The Biden White House published an official statement claiming, “Chinese automakers are seeking to flood the autos market in the United States and globally, posing new threats to our national security”.

Biden made this statement just a few weeks after the billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, publicly called for trade barriers, to weaken Chinese competitors to his company (which has received billions of dollars of subsidies from the US government).

“If there are no trade barriers established, [Chinese electric vehicles] will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world”, Musk complained in January. He added in despair that his Chinese competitors are “extremely good”.

The European Union is doing the same thing. In October, the European Commission announced an official investigation into Chinese electric vehicles.

This March, the EU revealed that it is likely going to put retroactive tariffs on Chinese EVs. (This came just a few weeks after Musk called for trade barriers.)

This is the root of the issue with TikTok. The West is waging a technological war on China.

Washington’s explicitly stated goal is to prevent China from catching up technologically and competing with US corporate monopolies.

This is an attempt to protect US Big Tech monopolies so they can continue to dominate the entire world, so there are no alternatives to US corporate hegemony.

By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.