How the media landscape will be changed by the US-China fight – Shirley Yu

 

Shirley Yu

Ironically, TikTok has become the ideal platform to spread American soft power, says business analyst Shirley Yu at Yahoo Finance. “The fundamental competition between the US and China is going to be technological competition,” which will have a big impact on the media landscape and the way in which we live, she says.

Yahoo Finance:

With the world’s second largest economy investing heavily in technology and innovative startups, China’s digital footprint is growing while the US seeks to dominate the digital landscape. This is leading to profound changes taking place within society as digital infrastructure plays a bigger role in our daily lives and people become more interconnected globally, and at high speed.

Shirley Yu, a Harvard-educated political economist and expert in strategic and economic affairs said this week that “the fundamental competition between the US and China is going to be technological competition,” which will have a big impact on the media landscape and the way in which we live.
The global media figure, former CGTN news anchor and founder of Business Talk Show Hey China! said that despite China’s economic growth and recent successes including TikTok, it had yet to make its mark culturally around the world in the same way that the US has done so.
“China does not, or has not produced very many strong public voices on the global stage who can communicate effectively in policy, in media, or even in politics, in a sophisticated way, with the rest of the world,” said Yu.
Despite the success of Bytedance’s TikTok, the Hey China! talk show host admitted that it is a crucial moment for the world to give a voice to the change-makers, thought leaders and Gen Z doers, who can tell their untold paradigm changing stories about China to the world, and bring inclusion to the media.

“China has not been able to develop a generation of global media icons, nothing near what the US has accomplished in this regard,” Yu reflected.
However, when asked about the potential banning of TikTok in the U.S., Yu noted that, “If you watch TikTok, TikTok has become ironically the perfect platform to spread American soft power, through the songs, dances and culture. American youth have successfully used a Chinese platform to spread American soft power all over the world.”

But as the technological competition heats up between the two world powers, companies like TikTok and Huawei have been caught up in the geopolitical confrontations, facing boycotts and bans in various countries. However, the technological shift toward 5G and China’s large investments in areas including IoT, AI, smart cities and digital tech means that the rest of the world including the US will be eager to match that effort – changing how we communicate and connect over the long-term.

More at Yahoo Finance.

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China tech firms turn away from the US – Ben Cavender

 

Ben Cavender

The tug of war between China and the US on how the possible US ban of Tiktok makes China’s entrepreneurs – especially those in tech – to rethink its involvement in the American market, says business analyst Ben Cavender to Jing Travel.

Jing Travel:

If it happens, the TikTok ban would likely cool the ambitions of Chinese companies looking to launch or expand operations in the U.S.

“This is one more sign the U.S. is a hostile business environment, especially in the tech space,” says Ben Cavender, Managing Director at China Market Research Group. “There’s a feeling amongst Chinese executives that the U.S. isn’t worth the bother. Better to focus on growth at home and winning high potential markets lacking strong domestic players. In Southeast Asia, for example.”

More in Jing Travel.

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Why Oracle might be the best buyer for Bytedance's Tiktok - Matthew Brennan

Oracle has taken over Microsoft as the preferred buyer of Bytedance's Tiktok in the US after the Chinese company got into problems with US President Donald Trump. Innovation expert Matthew Brennan says Oracle might be the better match as a buyer of Tiktok, he tells in Coinspeaker.

Coinspeaker:

ByteDance will be the overall decision-maker on who to sell its product to. Preferably, one that will offer the best cash deal, which both Oracle and Microsoft are capable of anyway, or one that will not pose a direct competition threat in future for its venture, where Oracle highly wins.

“The perfect company for Bytedance to sell to is one with deep enough pockets to pay a good price,” said Matthew Brennan, a social media analyst in Beijing.

Brennan added that the buyer should be “good enough at tech to actually run all the advanced AI (artificial intelligence that TikTok has)” but weak enough at consumer mobile that they would avoid arming a future competitor. “By these measures, Oracle sounds like a good fit,” said Brennan.

Oracle is actively providing the CIA with its database software solution, and the acquisition of China’s huge tech company might be a gateway to spying the Chinese market.

In addition, Oracle’s acquisition of TikTok will be a plus for the struggling company to venture into new markets and presumably the social media industry.

More in Coinspeaker.

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How can the US win an economic war with China? – Shirley Ze Yu

Shirley Ze Yu

Derailing China’s economic reforms is the only way the US can stop losing its leverage as the largest economy in the world, says political economist Shirley Ze Yu in the South China Morning Post. Improved market liberalization has every time helped China to improve its economic position, and the US has no other alternative to win this fight instead of blocking market forces in China, she argues.

Shirley Ze Yu:

It is understandable that the world’s predominant economic power wants to win an economic war against China, but how? One way is for the US economy to rise faster than China’s. The other is to stifle China’s rise.

It is hard to see any major technological breakthrough on the horizon in the US that would induce a significant economic take-off. Until that happens, the second-best strategy for the US is to damage

the Chinese economy.

Some of China’s hi-tech companies are under siege. TikTok and WeChat have been put on the White House 45-day banned list on August 6. Trump administration officials have also suggested that Chinese companies listed in the US should be delisted by January 2022 if they cannot comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s audit requirements.

Sifting through more than 70 years of the People’s Republic of China’s history, every period in which the Chinese economy has thrived has been accompanied by deeper liberal market reforms. Every major round of liberal market reform has unleashed enormous amounts of economic vitality.

Greater market liberalisation will therefore put China on a more robust economic growth track, pushing the nation towards the commanding heights of the global economy even faster than current projections.

The US, in principle, wants to see a more liberal China. In practice, though, it will benefit from an illiberal China by winning the economic war.

Ultimately, it is better to defeat an enemy without having to fight, rather than winning every battle, according to ancient wisdom. Thus, the most expedient way of winning for the US would be to derail the liberal market reform
process in China.

More at the South China Morning Post.

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Why Tiktok’s sale to Microsoft might be a good deal for Bytedance – Arnold Ma

Bytedance is negotiating the sale of popular video streaming app Tiktok with Microsoft, now it became into hot water with an executive ban by US President Donald Trump. Business analyst Arnold Ma tells CGTN why that might be a good deal for Bytedance, since it has 60 apps in China, not just a few like most tech companies, and might focus on those other apps. Even the price, 10 billion US dollars for a company valued at 120 billion, is not bad for an app that only exists for three years, he adds.

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Why Bytedance might sell Tiktok to Microsoft despite opposition - William Bao Bean

William Bao Bean

Chinese internet users have been voicing loud opposition against the possible deal by Bytedance to sell Tiktok to Microsoft, as the company might be hit by a ban by US President Donald Trump. But the verdict by startups and investors in China has been milder, says Shanghai-based VC William Bao Bean to Techcrunch. 

Techcrunch:

Startups and investors in China are more sympathetic toward ByteDance. Many agree that if the Microsoft deal goes through, it could be the least bad outcome for TikTok. 

“They are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said William Bao Bean, general partner at Chinaccelerator, a cross-border accelerator backed by SOSV. “We are in a fast-changing regulatory environment. I think the consumers would probably want to continue using the service, and this is one potential way to make that happen. Obviously, I don’t think it’s what ByteDance really wants.”... 

The tech community is well aware that TikTok is a rarity. Although the backlash will have a chilling effect on Chinese companies expanding to the US, and potentially other Western markets, there simply aren’t many internet companies going from China to the West in the first place. 

“Most solutions that are built for China don’t solve problems that people have in the West,” observed Bao Bean.

More at Techcrunch.

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Why China's apps (mostly) lack a global impact - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

Donald Trump's plan to ban Tiktok from the US is straight-up Sinophobia, says former Baidu communications director Kaiser Kuo to Slate. Most successful apps in China will not make a decent following among consumers in the rest of the world, he argues, just because they are too much adjusted to China's internet rules and customs, he adds.

Slate:

Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese American tech journalist and podcaster, and former spokesperson for the Chinese search engine Baidu, agrees that TikTok’s data collection has been aggressive but feels surveillance fears are overblown. “We have not seen any evidence so far that they’ve done anything nefarious. This is about our deeply emotional response to China. It’s straight-up Sinophobia,” he said in an interview prior to Trump’s ban threat. “If TikTok, which is just pure greasy kids’ stuff, is drawing so much fire, it’s hard to believe that anything wouldn’t.”

It’s also not clear that China really wants to develop globally successful consumer tech products. Kuo notes that TikTok’s success is something of an anomaly, since “the really successful apps in China, the very things that made them successful would hinder them from success in other markets.” Baidu, for instance, may be an excellent search engine but its compliance with Chinese censorship laws makes it difficult to export. 

The messaging service WeChat is an all-in-one swiss army knife app for its Chinese users, facilitating everything from payment to ridesharing to food ordering. Given its ubiquity, it’s also a powerful tool for surveillance and censorship, which is why the international edition is so pared down that it’s essentially a WhatsApp knock-off. 

TikTok’s domestic Chinese counterpart, Douyin, also boasts some micropayment and search features—in addition to censorship compliance—that are absent from the global version.

More in Slate.

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How Tiktok paves the way for third gen social media - Arnold Ma

Arnold Ma

Third-generation social media are getting ready to emerge, and marketing specialist Arnold Ma explains how Tiktok - Douyin in China - is leading the way away from platforms to content-driven communication, he tells at the UK Advertising Exports Group (UKAEG) at Shanghai International Advertising Festival (SHIAF) July 2020. Will WeChat survive in the new digital revolution? How 5G will change the world.

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Social media might be better off leaving Hong Kong - Shaun Rein

Shaun Rein`

TikTok has already decided to leave Hong Kong and other Western social media like Facebook and Google are trying to figure out what to do after China introduced its national security law to Hong Kong and they might have to cooperate with local police. Business analyst Shaun Rein suggests they would better off leaving Hong Kong altogether, in the South China Morning Post.

The South China Morning Post:

New implementation regulations for the law unveiled on Monday say it applies “whether or not the identification record or decryption key” central to a particular national security case is located in Hong Kong.

Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group, said that given how politicised Hong Kong had become, Facebook risked being criticised at home if it did not publicly say it would resist police requests.

“I think a lot of companies like Facebook have a decision to make. Is it better to upset the Hong Kong police and the government, or is it better to upset their home market in the US? So maybe it is better for them to leave Hong Kong completely,” he said.

Rein said there was a “real risk” that the legal representatives of these companies could go to jail or be fined if they did not follow the law, leaving tech giants stuck in a “very difficult and dangerous situation”

More in the South China Morning Post.

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Is TikTok meeting its Waterloo moment? - Shirley Ze Yu

Shirley Ze Yu

After a ban in India, short-video giant TikTok might be on the hit list of US Secretary of State Pompeo for a ban in the US too. Is US$100 billion unicorn Bytedance, TikTok's Chinese mother company, meeting its Waterloo moment, wonders political economist Shirley Ze Yu at her China in 60"

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China's internet regulations: keep it fuzzy - Kaiser Kuo

Kaiser Kuo

The successful social platform Tiktok got into hot water when it comes to its relation with China, now the company goes international. Former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo looks at The Ringer how Tiktok thrived, like others, in this climate of uncertainty, fuzziness and unpredictability that is key for China's internet.

The Ringer:

“I just remember it was like yesterday that we were all so disparaging of China’s ability to innovate,” Kaiser Kuo, a journalist who has worked in the Chinese tech industry and cohosts Sinica Podcast, told me. “Freedom was not only the necessary condition for being innovative, but it was also even, more hubristically, a sufficient condition.” But in recent years, China has gradually disproved that theory with its mastery of dockless bikes and mobile payments. The two countries are now competing to control the growing sectors of artificial intelligence and global telecommunications. And in May, the Trump administration moved to essentially ban the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from the U.S. market... 

From its launch, this lack of clarity has been apparent to TikTok users. Many teens have complained about being surreptitiously booted from the app. Others suspect their content has been intentionally kept away from the all-important “For You” feed. In late November, a 17-year-old Afghan American high-schooler named Feroza Aziz tucked a political message into a standard TikTok beauty tutorial. “Use the phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China,” she says in the clip, while curling her eyelashes. She then criticizes the Chinese government for keeping Muslim Uighurs in mass detention centers in the country’s far western region of Xinjiang. The video was briefly removed from TikTok, and Aziz was temporarily unable to access her account. But after the incident was picked up by news outlets, TikTok apologized, overrode her ban, and brought back the video, claiming these issues were due to a “human moderation error” and a separate, unrelated issue with Aziz’s account. Whatever happened, Kuo says this kind of lack of clarity keeps with standard Chinese censorship practices. When loading a forbidden website in China, users often encounter the same standard error page you might find with a weak Wi-Fi signal. “The line has always been sort of deliberately blurry,” Kuo said. “They deliberately keep it fuzzy so that the idea is if you’re not sure whether you’re going to step over it, you’re going to self-censor. You’re going to be more careful about what you say.”... 

Kuo, who worked at the Chinese search engine Baidu, says companies’ willingness to censor is often just a means to an end. “When the Cyberspace Administration of China sends somebody over, or when they’re having these conversations about what videos, or search terms, or topics need to be censored, it’s not like these companies are saying, ‘Oh, hey, let me suggest a few more to add to this blacklist,’” he said. “They’re trying to comply as minimally as possible. What goes on that list will be different every time and it will change day to day.”

More at the Ringer. Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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