‘Gangster Extortion’: China Mounts Media Blitz Against Trump’s TikTok Deal

“What the United States has done to TikTok is almost the same as a gangster forcing an unreasonable and unfair business deal on a legitimate company”, one of Beijing’s Party mouthpiece media outlets said Wednesday.

Sure, that’s propaganda, but it’s also true. For weeks, I’ve humorously described Donald Trump’s demands for a finder’s fee in the ByteDance/Oracle deal as “Bonanno-style extortion”.

It’s not clear whether the president has any conception of how bizarre his “request” that the US get a payment from TikTok’s buyer really is. Trump sees the world strictly in transactional terms, and while he’s no real mafioso, he has managed to turn the Oval Office into the opening scene of The Godfather, minus the cat.


“Amazingly I find that you’re not allowed to do that”, the president mused last week, after someone (probably Steve Mnuchin) told him that demanding Oracle and Walmart pay the Treasury to do a deal with ByteDance is illegal. “I said, ‘What kind of a thing is this?’ There’s no way of doing that from a – there’s no legal path to do that”.

The jury is still out on the fate of the TikTok tie-up and rhetoric out of China Wednesday suggests Beijing is losing patience with the absurdity of it all. The Global Times labeled Trump’s efforts to pry the app away from ByteDance and deliver a large stake in a newly constituted company to one of his political supporters an “unpalatable gambit” tantamount to “extortion”. Insult to injury is Trump’s (possibly dubious) claim that the proposed new company (“TikTok Global”) will establish a $5 billion fund to support what Trump is calling a “commission” on “patriotic education” for America’s youth.

Read more: Revisionist History Funded By IPOs And Forced M&A — A Glimpse Into Post-Democratic Capitalism

Trump said earlier this week that he may not greenlight the deal after all, as national security experts warn that Americans’ data may still be at risk.

Last month, China tweaked an export control list to ensure the algorithm behind TikTok isn’t transferred to a US company. Initially, it sounded as though the two sides were able to structure a deal that satisfied Trump’s ostensible “national security” concerns and Beijing’s worries about being subjected to a shakedown, but now, everyone sounds like they’ve got cold feet.

“Under the current agreement, a Chinese company will lose control of core technologies”, the People’s Daily seethed, calling that an “extremely unfair” risk to China’s national security.

Perhaps just as important, the same commentary characterized Trump’s TikTok deal as an attempt to strip a Chinese company of its “dignity”. Remember, that’s a big deal in Beijing. In America, we understand pride, but outside of the military, we don’t necessarily grasp the concepts of dignity and honor, which are more nuanced. Those concepts still mean something outside of the US, believe it or not.

In 2018, I suggested Trump would end up invoking “national security” to justify all manner of otherwise dubious maneuvers. In May of 2019, I called that a “Pandora’s box”.

Another editorial in Chinese media Wednesday served as a warning to the rest of the world: “National security has become the weapon of choice for Washington when it wants to curb the rise of any companies from foreign countries that are outperforming their US peers”.

Propaganda? Yes. Everything that comes out of Beijing is propaganda by definition. But that doesn’t mean it’s always false.


 

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5 thoughts on “‘Gangster Extortion’: China Mounts Media Blitz Against Trump’s TikTok Deal

  1. Looking more like Trump will back down and punt on TikTok until after the election. The last thing he can afford to do at this stage is alienate x number of voting-age users of the video-sharing platform.

  2. As far as I know, all governments are in the main business of propaganda. The sooner citizens recognize this the sooner we can clean up our messes.

    1. Sadly, our government’s propaganda has been outsourced to Fox News. I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that our president’s primary source of information is a cable “news” channel.

  3. Perhaps instead of paying money directly to the WH, Oracle de Mexico SA could receive a transfer payment to be used for building a border wall with the US, thus closing out another of the president’s earlier election pledges.

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