The Century of Humiliation won't be repeated over TikTok

Certain US Congressmen seem to have acquired the belief that they can force Chinese company Bytedance to sell application TikTok, the most downloaded social media platform on the planet.

Calling it a "choice," unhinged Representative Mike Gallagher makes the unproven assumption that the app is controlled by Chinese government and subsequently has pushed a bill demanding it be sold at gunpoint in order to continue to operate in the United States, where it has 170 million users. President Joe Biden has stated he would support the bill. However, legal experts have told the mainstream media they do not believe this will survive a legal challenge because of the implications it has for the first amendment.

The idea that the US believes it has a right to extort a company into selling a hugely successful operation is an act of extreme arrogance, entitlement and unbridled callousness. Not only does it illustrate the absurd levels of irrational paranoia and McCarthyism that have gripped Washington DC, but also the total lack of respect it has for China and its people.

Using the auspices of the Communist Party of China as a justifying premise for anything in the country they do not like, these politicians believe they have a right to undermine, trample over and diminish anything China has produced which is of equal or more success to America, showing the country's hegemonic mindset.

This kind of attitude, the belief that China must be "coerced" into handing over its economic assets and resources to the West, has been inflicted on the country throughout the centuries and was most present in what China describes as "the century of humiliation" whereby Western powers brutally subjugated the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) into accepting their will and being exploited according to their interests.

This is most famously depicted through the Opium Wars, whereby the British Empire waged war on China for refusal to open its markets to opium and forced it into the first "unequal treaty" which not only imposed the export of the drug on it by force, but also ceded Hong Kong as a port for doing so.

Other such "unequal treaties" over the years created other foreign concessions in China, allowed Westerners here to be exempt from local laws and treat Chinese people as inferior, second-class citizens. Although this system is long gone, the fundamental Western mindset that assumes China to be inferior and advocates a sense of entitlement to its markets and resources, remains and is manifest in the belief of American politicians that the country has a right to effectively "steal" TikTok from Chinese ownership by attempting to leverage its operation on the threat of a ban.

There is a line of thought present that only the US has the right to create globally successful media apps, and that China has no entitlement to do so based on a highly dubious political excuse.

However, the Century of Humiliation is over, and likewise any attempts to impose that kind of coercion and subordination on China will almost certainly fail.

When the Donald Trump administration in 2020 attempted to ban TikTok under the threat of a sale, an effort which also failed, the Chinese government responded by simply making it illegal for Bytedance to engage in such a transaction, and there is no reason to assume that has changed, the same rule applies today. Under no circumstances will Bytedance be allowed to sell such a wildly successful product under the threat of force to an American company. It is nothing less than effective robbery and contravenes every way and principle a free market is expected to operate.

If the US therefore goes ahead with a ban given there is no sale to be had, it will invoke the anger of over 170 million Americans who use it and will be a politically self-defeating move for any figure who endorses it. This in any case will demonstrate the paranoid, unreasonable and unhinged culture which overhangs Capitol Hill on matters pertaining to China. This is of course assuming such a ban will survive the inevitable legal challenge against it, which is also doubtful.

However, the message must be made clear, the US has no right to steal, undermine or impede China's success. The hysteria over TikTok is regurgitated paranoia based on a toxic mix of self-entitlement, McCarthyism and reactionary jealously, all of which are rooted in the inherent denial of China's own development and success, the idea that all countries big or small must be inferior to America. Competition of course is fine, but this isn't competition, it's extortion.

(The author, a postgraduate student of Chinese studies at Oxford University, is an English analyst on international relations. The views are his own.)