In China’s “socialist market economy” it is hard to tell which firms are closer to the party, and so more deserving of suspicion
love lip-synching to TikTok. Parents may be less enamoured of the boppy music-video app, whose popularity has exploded of late. For different reasons, governments appear wary, too. In February TikTok paid a record $5.7m fine in America for illegally collecting data on users under the age of 13. This month an Indian court banned the app on the grounds that it abets sexual predators. Bangladesh and, briefly, Indonesia, have banned it in the past year, alleging it promotes porn.
, a newspaper. Alibaba has 56 data centres overseas. Tencent owns 17.5% of Snap, creator of a popular American messaging app, and 7.5% of Spotify, a Swedish music-streaming service.No firm has animated worries about China Inc’s overseas forays more than Huawei, its most successful global company. Governments worry that its telecoms gear might enable spying on behalf of the Chinese state .
As a result, more Chinese acquisitions that involve the transfer of sensitive technologies are being scotched. Last summer America’s Congress beefed up the screening regime for foreign investments, making life harder for acquisitive firms from China. On April 1st Beijing Kunlun Tech, a gaming company, said that it was in talks with American government officials over its ownership of Grindr, a popular gay dating app that it acquired last year.
It is not just America picking on its chief geopolitical rival. Defence ministries in Australia and India have prohibited staff from using WeChat, Tencent’s messaging app. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has urged the app’s 1.5m Australian users to beware of propaganda and censorship. In March India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party complained to the election commission that Bytedance’s social-media apps were interfering in elections.
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