In my view, the threat to TikTok, the global subsidiary of Chinese app Douyin, has not disappeared. The best way to Douyin to protect its property would be still be for it to sell off TikTok to a non-Chinese company, such as Japan's SoftBank. That way it can receive full market value for the company. A forced fire sale later on down the road will cause it to receive only a fraction of the value. Also, a forced fire sale might come with a stipulation the buyer must be American, such as Oracle or Microsoft. There might also be an outright ban with no sale allowed. All of those scenarios would be worse than a sale now.
Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
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And what if USA bans tiktok, nobody cares. The world is not the USA, USA is not the world.
The Google Play store and Apple App store are used around the world, so if the US blocks those two companies from hosting the app, the app is banned worldwide outside China. IMO the upcoming Republican takeover of Congress ups the threat to the company, compared to the last two years.
By castrating Apple wrt Bytedance, congress can be rest assured that revenue in China will be zero for Apple, especially after Apple already denounced their decision to use more Chinese parts in their newest model and the whole iPhone made in india fiasco.
And trading a shitty short video platform with one of your last companies having good revenue in China is not a smart move.
brb gonna lose 10kg and start a geopolitics podcastSeriously man someone get this guy a make-up artist. I know he has stronk geopolitical knowledge, but props, set design, a wardrobe and makeup are key to a good podcast.
It's better if the podcaster was more good-looking, like this:
Companies like Alibaba and Tencent will have their apps booted from Android and IOS app stores soon.
He who controls the platform controls the market.
Sending in the tanks to crush pro-Pelosi protestors
You give too much credit to practical concerns over economics. Senators like Rubio and Cotton could care less about the effects on Apple. What they want to know is whether they can ride the China hate wave to more votes & a future presidency. We've already learned that CFIUS bypasses Commerce altogether in decision making. They could well push through a ban without consulting on the economic consequences at all.
The question is not economics, but political perception and reputation. Banning a Generation Z social media application because you're "scared of China" looks bad and that's why politicians are looking for a smoking gun to use on Tik Tok. They want the public to get behind them for the ban and not just force it through like they're scared of a platform where teenagers post dance videos. The economic losses are irrelevant; not looking weak or petty is very relevant.
Yes, China needs its own OS, but I'd argue this OS shouldn't be branded as a "China OS" because the key to the success of a platform is its global reach, and by saying "this is our OS" you're limiting your reach in a world that is increasingly about indigenizing supply chains.
I'd say China would be best served by embracing open source, and shame the West over its abuse of "open source" platforms. For instance, Android is "open source" but Google maintains complete control over its ecosystem, such that the US government CAN decide, at any given time, to ban virtually any application on Android phones.
This defeats the whole purpose of "open source"; and the best strategy for breaking the global addiction for Western platforms is to show how NOT global their control structure is, and how they threaten other countries' national security through their deeply embedded connections to Western corporations and governments.
At the same time, you'll need to offer an alternative, and to be successful, that alternative cannot be the same thing as the West's, except Chinese. In other words, to defeat Android, you don't want to create another Android, another "open source in name but proprietary in practice" OS, but rather a genuinely open source platform that has no strings attached, and which represents an honest collaboration between all the countries of the world that want to join it.
Are there draw backs to doing it this way? Sure. You're sacrificing control over the platform like what Google has over Android. But the reward is that you have an actual chance of destroying the Western monopoly on platforms. That ultimately benefits every country outside the West and so makes it much more likely China will be able to rally them to the cause. It's also what the West would be most afraid of - because in a world where technologies are actually democratized, they will lose their advantage.