The linear outcome of this ongoing state of informal submission is a rise in effronteries / audacious behavior at the official, international level, such as https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/12/philippines-wi...
"China has said it will not accept a ruling against it in a key international legal case over strategic reefs and atolls that Beijing claims would give it control over disputed waters of the South China Sea.
The judgment by an international tribunal in The Hague came down overwhelmingly in favour of claims by the Philippines and is likely to increase global diplomatic pressure on Beijing to scale back military expansion in the area. By depriving certain outcrops of territorial-generating status, the ruling from the permanent court of arbitration effectively punches holes in China’s all-encompassing “nine-dash” line that stretches deep into the South China Sea."
Five years later, it appears the case was quietly forgotten by all.
* * *
Or how about this, more recently: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france...
"... members of the French Senate demanded answers at a hearing with the foreign minister as to why an article they said was fake and cast them in a bad light was still up on the Chinese embassy website [...] In the post, an unnamed diplomat suggests that careworkers in Western nursing homes - using the French term EHPAD - had abandoned their jobs, leaving residents to die."
As an EU citizen, whether I'm kowtowing to Chinese or US imperialism is not all that different. Sure, I'd much rather live in the US than China, but in recent history, US influence outside their borders has been much, much worse for those under their heel than has Chinese influence.
I can think of substitutes for Apple (Huawei) and Amazon (Alibaba) with US market penetration, but I can't think of any for M. I can think of a couple reasons why off the top of my head but I'm curious as to what you think.
* Where's the monopoly? TikTok is one slice of the social media pie, unlike Facebook's ownership of Whatsapp/Messenger, Facebook.com, Instagram (with its Snapchat lite features).
* What are ByteDance doing with TikTok that's different from what US companies do with their social network data? e.g., Twitter. As a side-note one could argue Twitter aqui-killed Vine, setting the stage for TikTok.
* If desired, couldn't the Biden administration immediately return to the Trump-era policy of requiring ByteDance to sell a substantial part of their TikTok business to a US company? Which is a remedy that US companies complain about when China does it.
I see far fewer problems with TikTok's associations with China than I do with Facebook's ownership of many slices of the social media pie, never mind that the US has many 3-letter agencies hoovering up data from US owned social media networks, even about US citizens (at the very least all it takes is an interaction with a non-US account for the US account data to be considered fair game).