

Will a Biden presidency maintain this kind of pressure on QQ, WeChat and Huawei?

for picking on TikTok, Huawei and now WeChat and QQ - but that will change after the election. Meanwhile, China has not used tit-for-tat measures against the U.S. Going forward, multinational companies will have to deal with a tech decoupling, and new risk of doing business with China tech companies that could quicken a severing of ties in the worst case for Beijing, or a rejiggering of the China dominant supply chain into other Asian nations, still run by Chinese capital and management. “Those are allegations that China's tech firms have had to increasingly fight off over the past few years, and it's something that's going to persist,” thinks Nick Marro, lead analyst for global trade at The Economist Intelligence Unit, the business intel division of The Economist magazine.

What's a bit more damning - and what Rubio’s harking about QQ serves as testimony - is the growing concern of Beijing’s political ties to China’s biggest and best tech firms.

11 asking him to include QQ in his EO on WeChat. Assuming the main concern was over user data, perhaps Oracle will be in charge of all that and not ByteDance. The specifics of the Oracle-TikTok deal are unclear, with key words such as “tech partnership” not sounding at all like a traditional acquisition. The popular web conference company Zoom is run by a Chinese born techie named Eric Yuan, but he is based in California. But TikTok put China on the map as a global app developer for the first time. That tends to be enough, given that China has hundreds of millions of internet users with cell phones. Most of China’s apps, including WeChat and QQ, are local phenomenons. News broke on Sunday about Oracle’s deal with ByteDance’s TikTok, the first Chinese app to go global. That review is actually not complete, nearly 11 months later. One of the most vocal China hawks in the Senate, Rubio warned last October about TikTok when he requested Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) launch a full review of the national security implications of TikTok’s acquisition of Musical.ly. In August, Rubio got an op-ed published in The Washington Examiner saying he would introduce legislation to create a “framework of standards for foreign-based apps” to be allowed to operate in the U.S.
