Forced sales are the wrong way to deal with Chinese tech

IN DECEMBER 2017CFIUS a Chinese technology firm called ByteDance bought Musical.ly, an app which let its young users dance and lip-sync to music videos. This did not, at the time, look like a recipe for geopolitical strife. ByteDance merged Musical.ly with a similar app called TikTok, which started growing at a blistering pace. Today TikTok has 100m users in America, and competes with Facebook and Snap. With growing popularity has come growing scrutiny, as Sino-American tensions spread from trade to tech, and a barrage of invective from President Donald Trump. This looks set to culminate in a forced sale of TikTok’s American business to a domestic buyer. Touted as vital to protect Americans’ data, the crackdown is in fact a depressing example of jingoistic opportunism, more likely to chill investment in America and stoke Chinese nationalism.The legal basis for TikTok’s divestment comes from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (), which this week ruled that the Musical.ly deal was against America’s national-security interests. Having flirted with banning TikTok altogether, Mr Trump now seems willing to accept a fire-sale. Microsoft, an American software giant, is in talks to buy TikTok’s American operations, as well as those in New Zealand, Australia and Canada (see ).