Both sides of the US Congress have united last week to pass a bill mandating the sale of Tiktok from CCP operated Bytedance to a non-Chinese purchaser or else face a ban on the app within 270 days. Whether Washington’s move against the social media giant will result in a successful banishment of the app, a spate of VPN sales or a clever Chinese-backed network of subsidiary companies in the US remains to be seen.

If personal data is to be harvested from Tiktok’s 1 billion users, it seems that is to be harvested by bodies accountable to US law – a concept seized upon by the European Union, whose heftier corpus of civil and commercial law already defines an ‘in-house’ framework for dealing with the problem without having to resort to an outright ban. President, Ursula Van Der Leyen has voiced concerns that TikTok has breached Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and its Digital Services Act. Washington are still playing catch-up in regulating Artificial Intelligence with 91 bills currently before congress – putatively to protect citizens from algorithms which might pre-empt their online behaviour (as if tech Gurus at Meta and Google, with their access to American lawmakers, posed any less of a threat to citizens)

I was a regular visitor to Mainland China a decade ago and, for what it is worth, I don’t believe that the CCP are quite the efficient strategists that the West give them credit for. Unable to stop their own party members from sending their state-sanctioned fortunes to the USA via a network of associated casinos in Macau and Nevada. It was colossally inefficient but ‘a million dollars in Beijing is worth swapping for a hundred thousand dollars in America’ was the thinking. This pipeline (already responsible for a Chinese property boom in the Nevada desert), reached a height when Bitcoin enabled enterprising Chinese to ‘cut out the middle man.’ That’s why Bitcoin was banned by the CCP, leading to a boom in so called ‘sh*tcoins’ which triggered the ‘Crypto-Summer’ of 2021. Those crypto-currencies were nothing more than a sort of Islamic Banking cartel where blockchains substituted the need for trust and need for a few multi millionaires to cash out abroad generated local economies worth speculators buying into.

Then, as now, the possibility seems overlooked in the West that the CCP are actually able to use the power and knowledge they harvest to any useful end. But this won’t stop Western lawmakers reflecting the mistakes of the CCP by rewarding those who collect data and restricting the use of tech platforms in an attempt to protect themselves from a perceived foreign threat.