TikTok head, rushed to the "Hongmen Banquet"

Soon after, or on March 23, local time, TikTok's CEO Zhou Shouzi will have a positive dialogue with US congressmen and governors at the hearing of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, and will try to prove that this popular short video application cannot threaten US national security.

Zhou Shouzi said in a recent media interview that in the United States, TikTok has hundreds of millions of users, "It will be a great pity if users in other parts of the world can no longer hear their voices." ”

He further pointed out that now, the two sides must agree on "who is using TikTok, what value TikTok can bring to users, and what it means to take TikTok away from users..." These issues start a conversation, although it may not be easy. In his view, for some, "blocking TikTok" should not be a casual phrase, and it is not a problem that can be solved by a single tweet.

The Singapore-based CEO graduated from University College London with a degree in economics, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and served as senior vice president and president of Xiaomi's international division. More recently, Mr. Zhou has been mediating in the halls of the U.S. Congress to try to convince lawmakers here that TikTok is an app that has nothing to do with political antagonism.

At present, it is unclear whether Zhou's attempts will be echoed accordingly, but after he and U.S. Senator Michael M. Smith Shouzi After the meeting with Michael F. Bennet, the Colorado Democrat said he was grateful for his time, but he still believed TikTok was "an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security" and would have a "toxic effect" on American youth.

In response, TikTok said that the company respectfully disagrees with Bennett's evaluation of itself and will continue to work to educate local members of Congress and build trust with them.

Of course, TikTok is not alone in the United States. After visiting the Super Bowl, Zhou Shouzi also recently arrived in Washington. At least for the Super Bowl, the CEO was also a guest of NFL president Roger Goodell. It is understood that the NFL is a major promotion partner of TikTok. In addition to posting various viral marketing short videos, the NFL's official account also has around 10 million fans on the platform.

An NFL spokesperson believes that there is nothing to argue about Zhou's arrival. But in Washington, Mr. Zhou's reception was clearly worse. Councillor Roger Wicker will meet with Chow in the near future. But he also said it was done out of courtesy and insisted that TikTok was a distinct threat to U.S. national interests.

It is worth mentioning that these Republican-led "crusades" against TikTok have in turn attracted the support of some Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (whose daughter works at Facebook) said recently that TikTok's ban "should be watched."

Democratic Senator Brian Schatz noted, "I don't think they have anything to say ... These are their actions, and they are often shocking. ”

In recent years, TikTok executives have been pushing for negotiations between the company and U.S. national security officials to dispel the political skepticism that TikTok is carrying. As this skepticism intensified, Mr. Zhou also began an all-out offensive against U.S. authorities, trying to convince skeptics and critics through meetings with federal and state lawmakers, journalists, think tanks, and others that a nationwide ban on TikTok's data privacy and censorship dispute was not his only option.

"We understand that trust is lacking from the very beginning, and that trust cannot be won back with just one action, a ban, or a meeting," Zhou said. He said he hopes lawmakers will see TikTok — a place of creativity and free expression — like so many other users, and acknowledge that their anxieties about online data or teen usage are related to larger issues that need to be addressed through an industry policy rather than an app ban.

He further noted that many of the doubts he is trying to address are based on "misinformation" or based on "misrepresentations". Some TikTok staff also expressed disappointment at what they saw as unfair moves from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. As a background, Meta funded a covert media and lobbying campaign in which TikTok was portrayed as a foreign threat to young Americans.

"We should compete on product and user experience. This is the right way to compete. ”

TikTok is a privately held company with Western investors, nearly a dozen international offices, and thousands of U.S. employees. But its parent company, ByteDance, was founded by Chinese founders, raising concerns among some U.S. authorities about the app's data security and social impact.

In practice, however, the U.S. government has no evidence to substantiate its concerns, even though these two "issues" have become a major point of criticism in the United States, leading to regular local government inquiries about the app and device bans in more than two dozen states.

TikTok staff has begun preparing for Zhou's first hearing in Congress next month, and most expect him to be relentlessly questioned. His deputy, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, attended a heated hearing last September in which the app was called a "walking safety nightmare."

TikTok said it has spent $1.5 billion (and expects to spend another $700 million a year) on a corporate restructuring plan known as Project Texas — that would expose the company to U.S. government influence and oversight to a degree unmatched by any U.S. competitor.

Among them, TikTok's U.S. operations will be sealed into a subsidiary called TikTok U.S. Data Security, its leaders will be reviewed by the U.S. government, and its U.S. user data will be closely monitored and firewalled.

A number of initiatives have already been launched, including TikTok's opening of a code review center in Colombia last month. Officials at Texas-based tech giant Oracle can examine TikTok's algorithms and source code there to identify possible flaws.

TikTok officials told local lawmakers that such intensive government surveillance and compliance is more common with military or defense contractors than social media apps. However, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, an intergovernmental agency that has dominated negotiations between TikTok and U.S. authorities for three years, has not approved its restructuring plan or expressed any questions about it.

Zhou revealed that TikTok has already provided CFIUS with a complete blueprint for the restructuring proposal, but the company is still waiting for feedback. Some media asked CFIUS about the matter, but CFIUS did not respond.

In the case of the recent balloon scandal, the incident has also been used by some critics to criticize TikTok's social influence at the political level, although many of the many short videos associated with various depictions are from unfiltered views from the United States.

Zhou said TikTok is not out of the broad discussion, even though these things have little to do with TikTok, which in his view "is not the first and not the last company to be associated with all sorts of unfair analogies."

Although Zhou Shouzi is not much different from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk in his position, his reputation is clearly too low-key to the US authorities and the local public. On TikTok, the weekly number of followers is only 17,000, and most of them are travel, group photos or work-related content.

But at next month's hearing, Mr. Zhou, or his public image as a TikTok representative, may change. Some in Congress believe the company could twist the brains of young Americans. But he said he hoped local lawmakers would have a chance to see him for the real day.

"I have a strong confidence: in the end, the facts will triumph... At the end of the day, people are rational... While it's not always smooth sailing, we're also moving in the right direction by putting more facts on the table. Zhou Shouzi said.