Contrary to the current American discourse, not everyone in China is a government bot.
Jack Ma is a good case study, one of the most influential and successful businesspeople in china, and he was summarily thrown in jail for merely discussing ideas the CCP didn't like. There was no legal process, he just dropped off the grid completely, and then some time later the chinese government made ominous statements about how he was "embracing supervision."
No, it isn't. The idea of private companies existing to make money is exactly the same in China as everywhere else. Companies talk about serving the public good (as they do in the US as well), but they really just care about the bottom line.
> he was summarily thrown in jail for merely discussing ideas the CCP didn't like
He wasn't thrown in jail. He was pressured to stop directly criticizing the government, after he publicly criticized China's financial regulators.
Right now, TikTok faces much greater political pressures from the US government than it does from the Chinese government. It's a private company trying to make money, and trying to avoid scrutiny from both the Chinese and the US governments.
No, not everyone in China is a state bot. However, every company has to keep at least a few party members on their board and obey state controls constantly.
Couldn't the same be said of companies here in the US? We know the government is collecting data from US corporations. Should other countries be blocking Google, Facebook and Microsoft?
Companies do cooperate with the government, but for the most part that cooperation is either voluntary, or clearly defined by law which mandates cooperation.
There is still some reason for concern, but there is much less reason for concern.
That's why the sudden concern about TikTok theoretically being a problem comes across as an excuse for going after yet another Chinese company, as a way to pressure China and hamper its development.
> The state they operate in is going to make whistle blowing very difficult, not ever allow proper auditing into the state apparatus which ultimately controls the company.
You can have auditing and whistleblowing on the US entity (and include a promise of asylum in the whistleblowing protection), and big fines if they ever send data offshore.
Even if you move all of their code and mandate that they have a shell company in the United States, and you mandate that none of American data ever goes to China, they can ignore you. You validate that every request only stays in the United States? How do you validate that there's no communication between the two systems?
The state they operate in is going to make whistle blowing very difficult, not ever allow proper auditing into the state apparatus which ultimately controls the company.
You can administrate code, but unless you actually build that code yourself and basically understand it from the ground up with every single update, which is going to be nearly impossible, it's going to be very easy to sneak features through.
The problem is, keeping this safe is going to be a herculan task, and we're just not up to it. Facebook is tame in comparison, because at the end of the day they're subject to our open media, transparency laws, corporate auditing, and all of that other fun stuff.
We can reasonably pass regulations that help keep Facebook in check.
We cannot reasonably pass regulations which we'll keep TikTok in check.