Abstract
Although TikTok has in recent years become a highly popular yet controversial digital platform, few empirical studies have examined its development and the challenges it faces. In this article, we investigate how major media in China, the United States and India have interpreted and responded to the rise of TikTok, based on an analysis of news articles from 2017 to 2020. We identify the dynamic discursive practices of the de-politicisation and re-politicisation of TikTok before and after 2020. In the earlier stage, rather than being framed as a political issue, TikTok was depicted as an unexpected business miracle. However, since 2020, TikTok has been increasingly embedded in the escalating geo-political tensions between China and the other two countries. By highlighting how TikTok shifted from being an ambitious digital platform to a state-centred security issue, we suggest that the political dimension, especially the state–enterprise relationship, is crucial to understanding the discourse regarding internationalisation of the Chinese Internet.
Introduction
In June 2020, the Indian government banned 59 Chinese software applications, including the popular short video platform TikTok, which were accused of not only infringing on the data safety of local users, but also threatening the ‘national security and sovereignty’ of India (PTI, 2020). In late July, US President Donald Trump announced that TikTok would be banned in the United States out of national security concerns. This series of explosive developments made TikTok the focus of global media coverage. It is easy to treat these events as another case of a rising China being curbed by cautious Western powers. However, little serious empirical research has been conducted on the development of TikTok and the challenges it has faced. Studies have either focused on the motivation and behavioural patterns of TikTok users (e.g. Lu et al., 2020; Mackenzie and Nichols, 2020; Omar and Dequan, 2020; Shao and Lee, 2020; Zhou, 2019) or have analysed video content of a specific type (Chen et al., 2020; Fischer, 2020; Khattab, 2020; Serrano et al., 2020). We know little about some fundamental issues, such as how TikTok has been perceived in different countries and how political controversy about the application has emerged and gained prominence.
To fill this gap, we investigate how media discourses in China, the United States and India have reacted to TikTok’s global rise. This article analyses this issue through a discursive approach, seeing discourse as social practice (Fairclough, 1992) which not only reflects reality but also influences, constructs and produces it. On one hand, the mass media, especially the mainstream newspapers, remain an important source of knowledge for the general public. They influence the public’s understanding, perception and action on particular issues by setting agenda and providing frames. For example, as framing theory reminds us, the discourse of news coverage can give a topic specific meaning and influence public attitudes by emphasising salience of different aspects of a topic (Entman, 2004). On the other hand, there is no single, completely dominant discourse, as discursive practices are themselves processes of expression, contestation and negotiation by multiple actors, especially in the case of emerging and controversial topics. Through this process, power, relations and norms are established. The controversies associated with TikTok are undoubtedly embedded in a complex network of international relations, geopolitics and global Internet governance. Through discourse analysis, we are able to understand how different national media and political actors understand, interpret and construct the complex relationship between technology and national and global politics at a discursive level.
Specifically, we collected and examined 363 news reports from major newspapers in the three countries, covering the period from September 2017 to July 2020, to answer the following questions: What major themes have emerged from the media discourses regarding TikTok specifically and the internationalisation of the Chinese Internet in general? How has the rise of TikTok been interpreted and addressed in different countries? In terms of the relations between technology, geo-politics and the global communication order, what are the implications of the case of TikTok?
This article is anchored in the context of China’s Internet internationalisation. With 904 million Internet users (CNNIC, 2020) served by a vibrant Internet industry, China is one of the engines driving the global digital economy (BGC, 2017). However, because of the Great Firewall, which regulates its digital connection with the outside world, curiosity, speculation and confusion have surrounded the Chinese Internet. The Chinese Internet has long been regarded as lacking creativity, just mimicking what the American Internet giants have done. In addition, many studies have focused on China’s regulation of the Internet, such as censorship and online activism (Herold and De Seta, 2015; Kluver and Yang, 2005; Qiu and Chan, 2004). However, the global popularity of Chinese digital platforms such as TikTok not only demonstrates the innovation and competitiveness of the Chinese Internet industry, but also serves as a reminder that it is vital to shift our attention from its domestic development to its global expansion.
More theoretically, we contribute to the discussion about the dynamic state–industry relationship in a complex geo-political context. The Chinese economy is not just dependent on enterprises, but on the relationships between the state and the enterprises in a specific industry (Huang, 2017), as the critical difference between cultural and technological companies in China and elsewhere is the intrusive role of the state (De Kloet and Fung, 2017). However, studies have tended to simplify the relationship between the Chinese government and Internet companies as one of government control. In fact, it is a mutually beneficial political–economic alliance, with the government benefitting from the increased political legitimacy gained by improving China’s economy and companies benefitting from stable, ever-increasing profits (Miao et al., 2020).
TikTok represents an entirely different path for the global expansion of the Chinese Internet industry. In the case of a Chinese enterprise that has gone global, such as Huawei and ZTE, its growth and development are closely related to China’s national interests (Shen, 2020). However, TikTok has adopted a quite different approach of de-sinicisation by attempting to dilute or even conceal its connection with the Chinese government, or China as its country of origin. However, in recent political and media discourses about TikTok, re-politicisation or re-sinicisation – that is, re-establishing the connection between TikTok and China or even equating TikTok with the Chinese government – has become the main discursive strategy for those attempting to attack, investigate or ban the application. This reflects the complicated relationship between politics, business and technology in an increasingly tense geo-political context, a dimension largely neglected in the literature.
Literature review
Shifts in the state–industry relationship of the Chinese Internet
Most of the controversy about TikTok revolves around its Chinese origin. The underlying assumption is that Chinese Internet companies are usually under strict government supervision, and therefore are likely to transmit user data to the Chinese government, thereby endangering user privacy and even the national security of the countries where they operate. In this section, from a historical and contextual perspective, we aim to complicate this oversimplistic model of the controlling relationship between the Chinese government and Internet companies. Our discussion also maps the political, economic and cultural background of the development of Chinese Internet companies to better understand the environment in which internationalised Chinese social media platforms such as TikTok develop their strategies and characteristics.
We can roughly divide the development of China’s Internet into three stages based on the role of the government. The first began in the late 1980s, when the government actively promoted China’s access to the global Internet (Shen, 2017) and organised the construction of related infrastructures (Miao et al., 2018). During this period, the Chinese Internet was still in its early stages of technological development, but it had the crucial political mission of catching up with Western developed countries and realising modernisation.
The second stage began in the late 1990s, as China’s commercial Internet companies developed rapidly. In this stage, Internet services focused on news, information sharing and public discussion. The government regarded it as just a new type of mass media; consequently, it transplanted the regulatory principles used to manage traditional media to the Internet (Ang, 1997; Miao and Ang, 2016) and focused on controlling politically and ideologically subversive content (Yang, 2009).
Since 2010, the government has considered the rapid development of the Internet economy to be the key to the nation’s economic transformation and restructuring. A mutually beneficial alliance between the government and Internet companies has emerged. Internet companies have developed various ways to cooperate with the government in exchange for legitimacy and policy support. The government has also been working hard to help Chinese Internet companies expand, especially in overseas markets (Negro, 2017).
However, the government’s support does not mean it has relaxed its political and ideological control over these companies. On the contrary, since 2013, ideological control has been tightened in the context of national security (Yang, 2014). This environment has further strengthened the pragmatic partnership between Chinese Internet companies and the government. Under this model, these companies tend to focus on services that promote consumption and entertainment. Not only have the B.A.T. (Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba) become symbols and representatives of China’s Internet industry, but new Internet companies represented by ByteDance have also emerged.
To sum up, in contrast to the view that Chinese Internet companies and the government are in opposition, we emphasise that they are an alliance that continually seeks the maximum mutual benefit. However, this does not mean that we should equate the two. First, this relationship is not static, but full of changes, negotiations and even contradictions. Second, there is power asymmetry in this relationship. Although companies have agency and actively engage with stakeholders, including the government, to maximise their own interests, they largely occupy a relatively weaker position compared with the state. Third, this relationship is deeply shaped by the common economic interests of the government and companies. As Qi and Li (2020) found, the role of the Chinese government in the internationalisation of Chinese Internet companies promotes their breadth but limits their depth. When alliance with the government is no longer a necessary condition for their survival or even hinders their development, Internet companies may take measures to disassociate themselves from the government. This is exactly what TikTok has done with its de-politicisation strategy for its global development.
However, no matter how TikTok tries to downplay its Chinese background and its relationship with the Chinese government, it cannot change the fact that it has developed in the historical and social context outlined above. Its development has benefitted from the government’s supportive policy environment for the digital economy. Thus, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance cannot entirely ignore the expectations and requirements of the Chinese government and, as an internationalised Internet company with a Chinese background, it will inevitably incur distrust and even hostility from foreign governments. We therefore cannot fully understand TikTok’s international development strategy and the ensuing disputes without considering the larger context of government–company relations.
The road to internationalisation: embedding the Internet in geo-political tension
Once TikTok became a global phenomenon, it became subject not only to domestic political economic forces, but also to international relations and associated discursive contestation. In this section, we shift our focus from the domestic environment to the global context, especially recent geo-political tensions, to understand the controversies about TikTok.
Before further examining the case of TikTok, it is necessary to take a brief look at the internationalisation of China’s Internet industry. Although this trend can be traced back to the late 1990s, when Chinese enterprises were encouraged to ‘go out’ (Hong, 2017), it was in the 2010s that Chinese Internet companies took substantial steps to internationalise. Before this, they were not very interested in overseas markets, because China’s domestic market was large enough to meet their development needs (Negro, 2017). However, as most major Western social media platforms were expelled from Mainland China after 2010, local Internet companies have since developed rapidly and internationalisation has become increasingly important. In terms of strategies for going abroad, Candelon et al. (2019) have identified four major types: (1) ‘local players’, maintaining local advantages with moderate overseas development, such as the video streaming platform iQiyi; (2) ‘overseas investment’, investing heavily in the global market through mergers and acquisitions of local companies, such as the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform Lazada; (3) ‘global cooperation’, targeting overseas Chinese users, such as the travel service provider Ctrip International; and (4) ‘external development’, extensively taping overseas markets, represented by the user-generated content platform TikTok.
On the whole, the cross-border development of Chinese Internet companies has been unsatisfactory. The exception is the fourth category, of which TikTok is undoubtedly the most successful example. In terms of why TikTok has succeeded whereas other platforms have largely failed, most analyses have focused on the business aspect, while another significant factor, geo-politics, is often underestimated. TikTok’s recent global challenges highlight the importance of this neglected factor.
Compared to traditional multinationals, Internet companies are more likely to be involved in geo-political conflicts and power struggles. The reason is that the digital economy industry simultaneously involves multiple dimensions of the economy, culture, politics and ideology (Curran, 2012; Frau-Meigs et al., 2012; Jenkins, 2008). In this process, states have always been at the core of the struggle. Some scholars accordingly conceptualise the geo-politics of the Internet as a process of state-centred power struggle (Powers and Jablonski, 2015). The controversy surrounding the global cyberspace order is thus considered to reflect the differing strengths of countries’ digital industries. For example, Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese market (Schiller and Sandvig, 2010) and Huawei’s recent predicament in Western countries (Wen, 2017) both reflect a complex geo-political struggle between major global powers.
Given the above discussion, we aim to examine why and how TikTok becomes a controversial issue in a discursive dimension, with a focus on how different countries discursively construct the dynamic relationship between the Chinese state and TikTok. We believe that analysing TikTok will help us gain a better and deeper understanding of the internationalisation of the Chinese Internet in specific, and the complex interaction between technology, geo-politics and global communication order in general.
Methods and research design
To achieve our research goals, we selected major media reports on TikTok from China, the United States and India from 1 September 2017 to 10 July 2020. The nearly 3-year time span ensures that we can examine the changes in TikTok reports by major media outlets in the three countries from a relatively comprehensive perspective.
In terms of newspaper selection, we sampled the most influential outlets in the three countries. In China, we chose the ruling Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily and its tabloid affiliate Global Times. In the United States, we chose the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, two prestigious newspapers with high circulation and significant influence. In India, we chose the Times of India, the country’s oldest English-language quality newspaper, with the largest circulation and far-reaching social influence. It is needed to point out that our decision of only selecting one newspaper from India was based on the following considerations: on one hand, the focus of this study is on the comparative analysis of media discourses between the three countries, rather than on a comparison of media with different political biases in each country. Therefore, our sampling criteria are circulation and influence of the newspapers. From this perspective, it is appropriate to select only the Times of India, as it is the oldest, most widely circulated, representative and influential national English-language newspaper in the country. On the other hand, as discussed below, because the Times of India has a much larger number of reports on TikTok (n = 156) than those of the Chinese (n = 114) and American (n = 93) newspapers, we decided to analyse only one Indian newspaper for the sake of balancing the sample sizes of the three countries.
In terms of data collection, we used WiseSearch to retrieve Chinese news reports and Nexis News Database for those from the United States and India. Regarding search keywords, we adopted two methods for the Chinese case. First, we used ‘TikTok’ or ‘Tik Tok’, both of which are used by Chinese media. Second, given the fact that the Chinese term Douyin guojiban (the international version of Douyin) is often used to refer to TikTok, we searched by combining the keyword Douyin with guoji (InternationalForum), haiwai (Strategy) and quanqiu (global) to obtain the most relevant reports in the final sample. When searching for reports in American and Indian newspapers, we used ‘TikTok’ and ‘Tik Tok’, both seen in English news coverage, in full-text searches.
In addition, we selected the retrieved articles in two ways. First, in terms of subjects, we focused on news reports, excluding readers’ letters, book reviews, interviews and other subjects. Second, in terms of content, we ensured that TikTok was the core theme of all articles in the final sample by confirming that at least one-third of the entire article was devoted to TikTok-relevant issues. Considering that the amount of news in China is limited, we included news from the newspaper, its official website and the application version. Finally, we obtained 114 reports from China, 93 reports from the United States and 156 reports from India.
In terms of specific methods, we tried to combine content and discourse analysis. As for content analysis, we focused on describing the changes in the number and topics of news reports about TikTok in the three countries over the past 3 years, aiming to provide a general overview of media representation. In this process, we identified four main topics: technology, social issues, business and politics. Based on these topics, we developed an exhaustive codebook. Two of the three authors worked together to test its validity and then coded separately. Regarding the latter, we used Fairclough’s (1992) approach of critical discourse analysis to examine media coverage related to TikTok at the textual, discursive and social contextual levels.
Research findings
Among the sampled news articles, some overall trends emerged. We coded the primary issue area of each news item into four categories: technology, society, business and politics. 1 Generally, political (54.55%) and commercial (27.82%) discourses represented the most open codes. As for specific countries, in China, 81.58% of the news articles were framed as political discourse, whereas 24.56% were about business issues. In the United States, the proportion of political and business themes was relatively balanced, at 29.03% and 35.48%, respectively. Among the reports in the selected Indian newspaper, 50% focused on politics, 25.64% on business and 35.9% on social issues. 2 Regarding the time distribution, the number of reports on TikTok increased dramatically in 2020. Before 2020, there were 130 news articles in total and the proportion of political and business themes was 28.46% and 36.15%, respectively. After 2020, the number of news articles increased to 233. Furthermore, political discourse dominated the news, increasing sharply to 61.9%, whereas business discourse decreased to 23.18%. In the following analysis, we use the terms ‘de-politicised’ and ‘re-politicised’ mainly as generalisation of tendencies identified in the news discourse. Specifically, we tried to find out whether media discourse depicted TikTok as a political issue by connecting it with the Chinese state. Here, the state–enterprise relationship is a key element in determining whether media discourse is politicised (Figure 1).
Changes in issues and frames in the news in China, the United States and India before and after 2020.
Therefore, in this article, we elaborate on the business and political codes. Regarding the business codes, the close codes focus on market strategy, entry motivation, products and services, and local relations. As to the political codes, the close codes focus on content regulation, data safety and privacy, and global power struggle.
In addition, most of the news coverage was event-driven. We sorted the events most often mentioned in the news reports as shown in Table 1, which provides a brief history of the development of TikTok (Figure 2).
The timeline of TikTok’s development.
The timeline of TikTok’s development.
De-politicised discourse: an ambitious digital platform
Market strategy: to separate, not connect, the world
TikTok is often referred to as the international version of Douyin. In spite of similar interfaces and functions, they are two different platforms. To construct its international development strategy, ByteDance adopted the model of isolating services for the Chinese market from those for the rest of the world, rather than universalising them. This is considered one of its most distinctive characteristics compared with other Chinese Internet companies (Chen, 2020). However, only the American news reports explicitly mentioned this, whereas the reports from China and India rarely touched on this topic.
For example, the New York Times reported that two major Internets exist right now: China’s and the rest of the world’s (Zhong, 2018). The strategy adopted by TikTok is isolation: it does not try to unite the two Internet worlds through a set of unified models and logics. On the contrary, it acknowledges and adapts to this reality, creating two similar but mutually separated systems serving the two cyberspaces. This isolation is reflected at various levels frequently mentioned in news reports, such as management and human resources (hiring local employees and managers), content creation (mainly local user-generated content), information flow restrictions (posts on Douyin and TikTok are not interoperable) and data storage (building data centres outside of China). In one news report, TikTok was even considered to deliberately avoid content about China so as to obscure its Chinese roots, which may undermine its global expansion (DealBook, 2019).
However, the Chinese reports rarely mentioned this isolation strategy. Most of the reports used the term Douyin guojiban (the international version of Douyin) to refer to TikTok. Even if some of the reports mentioned that TikTok had taken measures, such as separating international and domestic data and hiring overseas personnel, most interpreted them as necessary measures to better understand and get a firm foothold in the local market. Only one article admitted that TikTok tried to keep its distance from its Chinese headquarters to minimise distrust in the international market (DeepTech, 2020).
Entry motivation: the attack of the giant from China
Some scholars have pointed out that the international development of Chinese media is often treated with scepticism, due to their close relationship with the Chinese government (Sun, 2015). However, TikTok did not initially encounter such doubts. Both in the United States and India, most reports before 2020 regarded it as an ambitious start-up digital entertainment giant, whereas the Chinese media saw it as a source of national pride.
Before the atmosphere became more politicised, the Indian reports mainly focused on the unstoppable development of TikTok in the Indian market. It was argued that as ‘the biggest market for TikTok, outside China’ (timesofindia.com, 2020a), India played a pivotal role in ByteDance’s international strategy. Similar to the Indian media before 2020, the American media also focused on commercial perspectives, describing TikTok as ‘China’s King of Internet Fluff’ (Zhong, 2018) trying to conquer the world. Nevertheless, the two countries’ responses also demonstrated some differences. Whereas the Indian media held a vigilant attitude towards TikTok, arguing that it represented China’s national interests in international cyber-competition (timesofindia.com, 2020b), the American news reports took a relatively positive view of TikTok’s technological creativity and market performance. For example, the New York Times described TikTok as ‘a social network that is genuinely fun to use’ (Roose, 2018) and ‘the first entertainment powerhouse born in and built for the smartphone age’ (Ovide, 2020).
In contrast, the Chinese media reflected dual expectations for TikTok’s success in the international market. Economically, China regarded the internationalisation of TikTok as a key strategy for tapping the global market. In this ‘overseas gold rush’ discourse, India was often seen as a rich source of TikTok users, whereas the United States was described as the most profitable sector of the overseas market. In terms of political and cultural strategies, although TikTok tried to shy away from the Chinese government, it was still regarded as a successful model for the Chinese Internet industry and even the entire made-in-China branding strategy (Yin, 2019). It is worth noting that this kind of nationalist discourse comes from the media, or quotes from government officials or experts, not from TikTok or its parent company ByteDance. This shows that regardless of their own wishes, it is difficult for Chinese Internet companies to completely disassociate themselves from the grand narrative of nationalism (Channel, 2020).
Products and services: young people, the Internet celebrity economy and algorithms
Regarding reports on the TikTok product itself, three main sub-codes were identified: users, usage and algorithms. All of the sampled newspapers in the three countries emphasised that the primary users of TikTok are young people. However, young users also present a series of challenges to the development of TikTok. For example, in the United States, TikTok was accused of illegally collecting the private information of users under the age of 13, which violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (Kang, 2019; Singer, 2020). In India, authorities briefly banned TikTok for allegedly promoting child pornography and other illegal content (TOI-Online, 2019).
The use of TikTok by teenagers has also been given multiple meanings: a creative community has formed around this application, due to the enthusiasm and motivation of young creators (Chakraborty, 2020). Furthermore, for many, TikTok is ‘one of the most accepting platforms when it comes to embracing different people’, where users of different backgrounds can gain opportunities to make their voices heard and express themselves regardless of what others think about them (Zhong and Schultz, 2020). TikTok is also a place where people can ‘make viral fame, look for career option[s]’ and become famous overnight (Chakraborty, 2020). In India and China, media reports repeatedly recounted stories about users in poor areas becoming celebrities on TikTok, thus changing their lives. TikTok is thus a ‘game-changer’ for many marginalised users, for whom ‘virality . . . translate[s] into money as much as fame’ (Banerjee, 2020b).
TikTok’s unique algorithm is generally considered to be the principal reason for its success. The New York Times stated that the ‘algorithmic features of TikTok makes itself unique and rewrite the landscape of social media’ and its ‘aesthetic and functional similarities to Vine or Snapchat or Instagram belie a core difference: TikTok is more machine than man’ (Herrman, 2019). Compared with most other social media platforms, TikTok is much less dependent on interpersonal relations. Instead, it relies heavily on user behaviour, algorithms and artificial intelligence learning capabilities to create an endless stream of short videos (Herrman, 2019). The Indian news reports also claimed that TikTok’s algorithmic mechanism of recommendation is quite unusual, in that it usually allocates 200–300 active viewers for videos uploaded by new users. Through this mechanism, newcomers are able to compete with established popular creators who already have tens of thousands of fans. This feature is attractive to young Indians who are desperately eager to get fame (Chakraborty, 2020).
Local relations: competing with enterprises and cooperating with the government
TikTok’s commercial development in the international market inevitably involves interaction with relevant actors. The sampled news reports present two major aspects of interaction: the competitive relationship with local enterprises and the cooperative relationship with the government. In the Indian market, TikTok faces pressure from competitors, such as India’s own short video application Mitron. But as pointed out by observers, Chinese Internet companies have taken a dominant position in the Indian information and communications technology (CAICT) market (timesofindia.com, 2020). In the Chinese media reports, TikTok was seen as an emerging force challenging traditional Internet giants, with the internationalisation of TikTok described as ‘a showdown between the old overlord and the new strong’ (InternationalForum, 2019). The American media reports on competition focused on disputes caused by ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly and Facebook’s competitive strategies (Nicas, 2019). It also defined TikTok’s success as ‘the most direct incursion yet by a Chinese company into Silicon Valley’s turf’ (Nicas, 2019). TikTok is thus regarded as ‘the first ever Chinese consumer-tech company to break out big in the U.S.’ (Wells and Jie, 2019).
Different from their accounts of fierce market competition, the media reports from the three countries had a relatively positive tone when discussing TikTok’s interactions with local governments. In the Chinese media reports, TikTok was described as actively adapting itself to the international market and establishing a positive relationship with foreign governments. Many of the US reports emphasised that to minimise political distrust, TikTok has taken various measures to maintain, improve and promote relations with local government. For example, TikTok adjusts its privacy, security and content reviewing rules according to local laws (Zhong, 2018); recruits and organises local management teams and leadership to ‘minimize reminders of its Chinese roots’ (DealBook, 2019); invites third-party public relations agencies to handle the relationship with the government; and conducts independent investigations of public security concerns (Nicas et al., 2019). The media reports from India also described TikTok’s measures to actively cooperate with the government to better integrate into the local market. For example, in response to the government’s accusation of ‘spreading vulgar content’, TikTok established a local security centre (timesofindia.com, 2019) and published a transparency report (Hariharan, 2020).
Re-politicised discourse: ICT and geo-politics
Content regulation: reasonable regulation or censorship?
Content regulation is a critical issue in the TikTok controversy. According to the sampled reports from the American and Indian newspapers, there have been two contradictory discourses. The governments of both countries have criticised the presence of content inappropriate for children on TikTok, such as pornography, and demanded the platform to tighten its content review (Hussain, 2020; Kang, 2019). The news reports also covered TikTok’s countermeasures, such as developing a ‘family safety mode’ and setting up ‘digital well-being’ features, including screen time management, direct messages and restricted mode.
However, the United States and India have been worried that TikTok may follow the Chinese government’s directives to censor or highlight certain content and thereby manipulate public opinion. Some of the sampled news reports from American media mentioned TikTok’s censorship of sensitive China-related content, such as posts about Xinjiang and Hong Kong (Lin and Xiao, 2020). The New York Times even warned that TikTok could become a public opinion platform for China to influence American politics, in the same way that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election (Yuan, 2019). The Indian media also claimed that in response to moderate criticism of China, TikTok has adopted a ‘shadowban’ approach, setting the number of video views to zero and cutting off links to other videos (Banerjee, 2020a). All of these news reports emphasised TikTok’s Chinese background and its potential connection with the Chinese government, hinting at its untrustworthiness. For example, a New York Times reporter asked, ‘How did a company that is further democratizing self-expression come out of sternly undemocratic China in the first place?’ (Zhong, 2018).
In the face of these doubts, the response of the Chinese media has been selective. Regarding inappropriate content on TikTok, the Chinese media reports quoted TikTok’s official response, emphasising that it has been actively cooperating with official regulations and improving its measures against such content. However, they completely avoided the issue of possible Chinese government interference. None of the sampled Chinese news reports touched on this issue or made any attempt to clarify the relationship between the Chinese government and TikTok. On the contrary, they reported on how TikTok cooperated with local government to carefully review uploaded content and pointed out that the United States and India are the two countries that have issued the most regulations and deletion orders to TikTok (jiemian.com, 2020).
In short, the focus of the sampled media reports is not whether content on TikTok should be reviewed, but who decides what should be reviewed. In other words, the core concern is whose interests the review ultimately serves. These discourses transform TikTok from a relatively neutral commercial high-tech company into a political subject embedded in the positions and interests of specific countries involved in a geo-political competition. From the American and Indian perspectives, TikTok could be a digital Trojan horse through which the Chinese government can manipulate international public opinion. As the Indian newspaper pointed out, ‘TikTok is to serve China’s global political and military purposes’ (Banerjee, 2020a).
Data safety and privacy: a technical or political issue?
Both the American and Indian news reports not only mentioned the rapid development of TikTok and the geometric growth in the number of users, but also expressed concerns about personal information security and privacy protection. Some of the reports briefly mentioned TikTok’s official responses and countermeasures, such as strictly complying with local data security policies and setting up data management centres outside of mainland China. However, overall these sampled reports imply that the measures taken by TikTok have failed to eliminate doubts and concerns about its data security issues. The Indian media reports cited a large number of accusations from different figures, ranging from officials to industry opinion leaders, who believed that TikTok not only ‘shared information of Indian users with any foreign government, including that of China’, but also ‘misappropriat[ed] user data’ (Singh, 2020). TikTok was labelled as ‘spyware’ (timesofindia.com, 2020b) and regarded as a threat to India’s ‘data sovereignty’ (PTI, 2020). As China’s relations with the United States and India deteriorated, this argument was accordingly strengthened. For example, the Times of India clearly stated that the ban on TikTok was instated under an emergency clause of the IT Act after a border clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers (TNN, 2020). Some of the reports also framed the ban as a blow to China’s Digital Silk Road project and described the Indian government’s action as a form of military strategy, reflecting ‘a larger effort to thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy to mine data for both political and military purposes’ (Bagchi, 2020).
Although concerns about TikTok’s security issues have evolved from initial worries to crusades and accusations, none of the newspapers provided clear evidence. Most of the criticism about safety issues came from the American and Indian armies, governments, members of Congress, nongovernmental organisations and business leaders who compete with TikTok. In contrast, the only defence cited was from TikTok itself, whereas the positions of the Chinese government and other sources were neglected. This method of reporting strengthened the perception that TikTok has a close connection with the Chinese government and reflected long-entrenched ideas about China in international journalism: China is a one-party authoritarian country, and TikTok comes from China, so it must be forced to obey the government’s demands. Therefore, when Chinese officials wish to collect information from other countries, TikTok will inevitably hand over the data it collects from millions of users, posing a severe national security threat to the host country.
The Chinese media did not directly respond to the question of whether the Chinese government requires TikTok to provide data, but adopted a discursive strategy of confrontational accusation. For example, in response to India’s ban on Chinese applications, the media repeatedly quoted the views of the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in India, accusing India of taking ‘discriminatory restrictions, reasons of which are vague and far-fetched, and procedures violate fair and open procedures’ (Shan and Wang, 2020). In response to Trump’s allegations against TikTok, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson pointed out that ‘the speeches of some American officials are sheer fabrication and malicious slanders’ (Cui, 2020). In response to the accusations from the United States and India, the Chinese media took a more politicised perspective, interpreting TikTok’s experience in the United States and India as a manifestation of geo-political conflicts between China and the other two countries. In one news report about India’s ban on Chinese social media, the author concluded, ‘TikTok, like all other Chinese apps, is not facing a legal lawsuit, but a political trial without any just procedures’ (Hu, 2020).
The game of global power struggles
With the escalation of China’s conflicts with India and the United States in 2020, reports on TikTok have increasingly focused on international relations and even the global power structure. The news reports from the three countries also reflect unequal international relations. Those from India focused on the impact of Chinese Internet applications on its domestic development and showed more resistance to Chinese companies, such as TikTok. For example, the Indian news reports repeatedly emphasised that one of the primary purposes of the international expansion of Chinese Internet companies, especially those involving civilian infrastructures and emerging new technologies, such as AI, is to serve China’s political and military ambitions, a strategy that embodies the CCP’s ‘military–civilian fusion’ policy (PTI, 2020).
The sampled American media reports also mentioned that the success of TikTok in the US market forced ‘Americans for the first time to consider living in a world influenced by a Chinese-backed social media network’ (Yuan, 2019) and noted that it represented ‘the first time that Americans have had to consider that U.S. companies might not always rule the internet’ (Ovide, 2020). These reports imply that Chinese Internet companies are challenging the dominance of the United States in global cyberspace. However, they did not frame the US government’s suppression of TikTok as a result of competition for digital hegemony. Instead, these reports continued to use the technology and security frame to justify the actions taken by the US government. That is, these actions were not so-called political retaliation, but counter-actions aimed at TikTok’s technical defects and its suspicious connection with the Chinese government.
In the Chinese media discourse, it was argued that India’s ban on TikTok was an act of retaliation, but India was not regarded as a powerful competitor in the global cyberspace. The Chinese media emphasised China’s massive share of the Indian ICT market and the benefits it brings to India. From this perspective, India’s ban on TikTok will not be as harmful to China as its negative impact on India. Other reports mentioned the domestic situation in India, arguing that the real purpose of banning Chinese applications was to stir up nationalist sentiment and shift attention away from domestic crises. Some of the news reports pointed out that India’s ban on Chinese applications ‘has something to do with Western agitation and provocation’ (Strategy, 2020). In contrast, when the target was the United States, the basic view in the Chinese media was that TikTok has challenged the American hegemony in global cyberspace and thus violated its vested interests. Therefore, the American actions of investigating, reviewing and even threatening to ban Chinese applications are regarded as a form of retaliation for being challenged by China in the digital sphere (Zhang and Xin, 2020).
Conclusions and discussion
TikTok is China’s most successful and popular, but also most controversial, global social network platform. In this article, we examine news discourse from major outlets in China, the United States and India to understand how TikTok has been perceived and framed against the context of global geo-politics. We have tried to go beyond the traditionally economically centred approach to analysing China’s industrial internationalisation strategy by emphasising the importance of geo-politics and international relations.
Specifically, we identify the two opposing strategies of de-politicisation and re-politicisation in TikTok’s internationalisation process. In other words, we attempt to understand how the company’s own de-politicised market strategy and relevant national stakeholders’ re-politicised strategy put TikTok in its current predicament.
Our analysis shows that before 2020, both American and Indian media regarded TikTok as an ambitious digital giant from China. A commercial competition frame obviously dominates the discursive logic here. However, since the beginning of 2020, the frame has quickly shifted from commercial competition to the infringement of citizens’ privacy and even to a national security threat. As analysed above, this shift was realised through disputes in three main areas: content regulation, data security and international power struggle. In this process, TikTok’s Chinese background and its relationship with the Chinese government became the focus of news coverage and the nationalist frame calling for greater defence of national security took over.
In contrast, the Chinese media reports completely avoided mentioning the international community’s questioning of China’s political system and Internet policy, never trying to clarify or respond to the accusations from the United States and India. Instead, they attempted to shift the focus of the problem by contextualising the case of TikTok as one of China’s economic, political and military confrontations with the United States and India, depicting the latter as trying to contain China as a peaceful rising power. Similar to media discourses in India and the United States, the Chinese media also emphasised that the TikTok dispute was not commercial but political in nature. Nevertheless, the two sides have different definitions of the term ‘political’. In contrast to the Indian and American media, which politicised the issue by focusing on the nature of the Chinese state and government, the Chinese media argued that India and the United States were engaging in retaliation against Chinese companies, including TikTok, because their vested interests had been challenged by China. It can be seen that in the case of TikTok, the Chinese media and their counterparts in India and the United States have not developed effective dialogic interactions. On the contrary, given their different social contexts and target audiences, they have followed different discursive strategies to re-politicise TikTok.
As the Internet industry has expanded, slogans such as ‘free flow of information’, ‘network without borders’ and ‘connecting the entire world’ have dominated mainstream liberal discourse. The logic here assumes that technology is neutral and romanticises globalisation. However, the case of TikTok demonstrates that geo-political tensions and national boundaries have profound impacts on the development of the global Internet, especially when international confrontations occur. The global proliferation of ICT-facilitated applications and services from emerging powers, such as China, will inevitably lead to conflicts with existing global or regional powers whose current dominance in cyberspace is shaken. The controversy surrounding TikTok continues to grow, and China, as an emerging cyber superpower, will definitely not stop its international exploration just because of individual companies’ setbacks in the international market. These developments will lead to increased pressures to reconstruct the global power structure. The long-term impact of the international development of the Chinese Internet industry is therefore a topic worthy of continued attention and analysis, especially from the lens of political economy communication, digital geopolitics and global Internet governance.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China ( 20BXW037, 19ZDA331, 21@ZH021), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. CUC210B002), and the Ph.D. Research Foundation Project of Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication “Digital Media and Everyday Life” (No.27170120003/016).
