China uses TikTok to expand its influence globally, US lawmaker says

CHINA is using TikTok to expand its influence around the world, a leading Republican lawmaker said on Monday (Feb 27) in arguing that the popular video-sharing app that’s owned by a Beijing-based company should be banned in the US or sold off.

Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of a new House committee scrutinising China, argued for the urgency of decoupling the world’s two largest economies and pointed to the country’s bid for more influence overseas as a sign that it must be countered.

“The exact same strategy, tactics and technology that CCP uses to control the Chinese people in China are increasingly the same strategy, tactics and technology they’re using to control Americans,” Gallagher of Wisconsin told reporters, referring to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Gallagher’s new select committee is set to hold its first hearing on Tuesday at 7.00 pm Washington time, in the latest sign of an ever-deepening hawkishness towards Beijing by both parties on Capitol Hill.

That’s been fuelled most recently by the uproar over an alleged Chinese spy balloon that transited across the US as well as Biden administration claims that China is considering whether to supply Russia with lethal support for its invasion of Ukraine.

China has pushed back on what it called “hysteria” over the balloon and said it doesn’t offer weapons to conflict zones.

“Recently there has been too much disinformation about China in this regard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said in a briefing Friday. He added that China’s position on Ukraine “boils down to one phrase: to advocate peace and promote talks”.

One of the select committee’s goals is “to emerge with a coherent framework for selective economic and financial decoupling”, Gallagher of Wisconsin told reporters. “In my opinion, this is the most difficult and complex aspect of our competition with China.”

Gallagher has been pushing legislation that would ban TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, or force its sale and said he’s “very suspicious” of an agreement that TikTok has proposed to protect data from US users and insulate the platform from Chinese influence.

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He said that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, which is reviewing TikTok’s operations, could be crippled by members representing the Treasury Department that “have been a bit less hawkish on China” than members from the Defense Department or the National Security Council.

The bipartisan House committee will review other aspects of US competition with China, including export controls and outbound investment review designed to limit US capital that Gallagher said could “unwittingly fund” human rights abuses or advances in military technology. BLOOMBERG