China will likely retaliate against U.S. President Donald Trump if he succeeds in forcing China internet company ByteDance Ltd. to sell its popular video sharing service Tiktok to Microsoft Corp.
The threat was made against Trump and his administration by Global Times, a daily newspaper owned by the Communist Party of China. In an editorial Tuesday Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin blasted Trump's move as "open robbery" and said "Trump is turning the once great America into a rogue country."
In his opinion article headlined "US 'robbery' of TikTok angers Chinese hi-tech companies," Hu said China "has plenty of ways to respond if the administration carries out its planned smash and grab" of TikTok.
He said TikTok's situation was a warning to other China technology companies that they were in danger of running foul of the Trump administration for political reasons. Hu claims "Chinese tech companies entangled in the ever increasingly nasty crackdown waged by the U.S.' Trump administration are mulling to act proactively." He didn't say what these measures were.
He criticized Trump for giving ByteDance 45 days only to reach a deal to sell its U.S. business to Microsoft. He said Trump had turned the transaction into a "fire sale" intended to force ByteDance to surrender its business interests and intellectual property "at a discounted rate."
"The drama to forcibly hand the highly successful TikTok over to a U.S. company has drawn widespread criticism across the Pacific, and has become another vivid lesson viewed closely by China's rising tech companies eyeing overseas market expansion amid an escalating tech war between the world's two largest economies which had already seen dozens of Chinese tech firms hit by US blacklist," Hu said.
He quoted Zhou Shijian, a senior research fellow at the Center for U.S.-China Relations at Tsinghua University, saying Trump was attacking TikTok simply because Trump couldn't accept a company from China becoming a winner in the U.S. technology sector.
Zhou said TikTok should bring the case to the New York-based U.S. Court of International Trade. TikTok should charge the U.S. federal government with interference and limiting a foreign company's intellectual property rights.
On Monday Trump said it would be easier for Microsoft if it bought all of TikTok's operations in the U.S. Canada, Australia and New Zealand instead of a small part of the business. He said Microsoft should pay the U.S. Treasury for arranging the deal.
"I think buying 30% is complicated and I suggested that (Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella) can go ahead, he can try," Trump said. Trump wants Microsoft to pay the U.S. a substantial amount of money because without the U.S. Microsoft would have nothing, he said.
