While China's semiconductor industry is being frantically hunted and suppressed by the United States, Chinese apps with a huge number of fans have become the target of the US technology war against China.
The hearing of the US Congress on the overseas version of TikTok has just ended, and the United States has recently made a series of new moves, adopting a variety of means to further stifle Chinese apps.
According to foreign media reports, another Chinese cross-border e-commerce app Shein, which is popular in the United States, is being boycotted by some politicians, and the United States has also formed a new civil alliance called "Shut Down Shein", which believes that Shein poses an "unprecedented" threat to the United States.
Florida recently issued a ban on TikTok, WeChat and QQ at public universities across the state, banning access to these apps on school networks and installing these apps on school devices.
The British "Guardian" bluntly said that the United States is launching an "APP war" against China.
What is the United States afraid of?
As for the rationale for cracking down on Chinese apps, U.S. officials say that such apps hold a large amount of data on American users, and this data is likely to be accessed by the Chinese government.
But so far, the U.S. has found no evidence that such apps leak user data to the Chinese government.
At the TikTok hearing held by the US Congress, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi made it clear to the US side that the servers of the relevant data are stored in the United States and managed by the US company, and the company has also taken third-party monitoring, review and verification measures to ensure data security.
TikTok CEO Zhou was questioned in the U.S. Congress
The official smear of Chinese apps by the United States is simply untenable. In fact, the illegal collection and leakage of data exposed by local Internet companies in the United States is shocking.
American retail giant Amazon, photo-sharing app Instagram, well-known social media Facebook, instant messaging app WhatsApp and other well-known companies and apps in the United States have all been fined huge fines by government regulators in many countries for illegally collecting and leaking user data.
According to the Associated Press, many U.S. high-tech companies engaged in data-harvesting have long gone out of their way to collect user information.
According to Forbes Technology reporter and veteran writer Baker White, Chinese app companies such as TikTok spend far more on data and privacy protection than their American counterparts.
Therefore, discerning people have long seen that the reason why the US government is hostile to such applications has nothing to do with protecting the data privacy of Americans, but only the Chinese origin of these applications.
Greer, director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit organization in the U.S. digital rights arena, said, "If policymakers want to protect Americans from surveillance, they should support the most basic privacy laws that prohibit companies from collecting sensitive information about us, rather than directing a xenophobic drama that simply doesn't help."
Farhart, a researcher at the Internet Governance Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, also said that forcing Chinese companies to sell apps in the United States "has absolutely nothing to do with any so-called national security threat and violates American free market principles and norms."
As early as 2020, the American "Atlantic Monthly" pointed out in an article titled "Why Americans are afraid of TikTok" that the hostility of the United States to Chinese applications does not lie in the applications themselves, but in the fact that these Chinese applications challenge the dominance of the United States in the field of science and technology.
"At a time when the United States already regards China as a 'strategic enemy,' no matter where these companies put their servers or how many Americans they employ, it is difficult to reverse the United States' distrust of China, which is the real problem facing these Chinese applications."
The Atlantic: Why the U.S. is afraid of TikTok
Does the U.S. repression work?
Although the U.S. government is working hard to crack down on Chinese apps, the growing popularity of Chinese apps among Americans has not changed.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that in March this year, four of the five most popular apps in the United States were of Chinese origin.
Wall Street Journal: Why Chinese apps have become a favorite among young Americans
According to data from market research Sensor Tower, Pinduoduo's Temu, which has been launched only 7 months ago, is the most downloaded app in the US app store. It was followed by CapCut, TikTok's video-editing partner app, which came in third, and fast fashion retailer Shein, which was developed and launched by Chinese social media or e-commerce companies, in fourth. Facebook is the only non-Chinese app in the top five.
China's huge tech talent pool and well-established product design process mean that its apps tend to be more relevant to the actual needs of users, which is the root cause of its high number of downloads.
A recent article in MIT Technology Review specifically examines why Chinese applications have become popular in the United States. Although the U.S. government tries to exaggerate the additional risks posed by Chinese apps, in practice, users don't really care which country these apps come from, they care about whether these apps are interesting and convenient to use, so "unless the U.S. government imposes a blanket ban on Chinese apps, more people will continue to use them."
The latest survey of the American people by the Pew Survey Center also shows that among all TikTok users, the number of users who agree to ban TikTok is only 19%, and most users explicitly oppose the US government's ban on TikTok.
Americans protest the government's ban on TikTok
The U.S. government's crackdown on Chinese apps violates both market rules and public opinion.
As an American netizen named @bunnihunnii said: "The US ban on Chinese apps has nothing to do with Chinese apps themselves... It's tiresome to get tired of all kinds of legislation under the guise of doing good for the people, when in fact they are just going for their own benefit. ”
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Source: "Wu Zhiguan see" WeChat public account