Legislators Discuss Banning TikTok Over Growing Security Concerns

Year by year, tensions between the U.S. and China continue to grow. And in this Cold War 2.0, the battle over information technology and policy often appears to be at the heart of the conflict.

Chinese telecommunications equipment giant Huawei has been effectively barred from the U.S. market for well over a year. But the constraints are tightening. And while Huawei has been central to China’s global communications aspirations, disputes over technology are now affecting all sorts of Chinese-owned companies. Even ByteDance’s TikTok, arguably the world’s hottest social media company with more than 100 million U.S. users, now appears in jeopardy.

After two decades in which the countries’ economies and technology industries converged, they are now coming apart. Remember the American perception of China at the time of the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008? China was regarded as a global competitor, but not an adversary.