China Daily, a Beijing-backed newspaper said that China will not accept the “theft” of Chinese technology and can respond to Washington’s move to push ByteDance to sell short-video app TikTok's US operations to Microsoft.
The United States' “bullying” of Chinese tech companies was a consequence of Washington's vision of “American first” and left China no choice but “submission or mortal combat in the tech realm”, the state-backed paper said in an editorial, Reuters reported.
Trump has said that he intended to ban the app on national security grounds unless a deal was struck by September 15. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Trump would take action shortly against other Chinese software companies that shared user data with the Chinese government.
This move from the US also is the result of a long-standing tiff between the two nations that began in 2018, when the two countries were involved in a trade war. It then worsened when the US blamed China of not being transparent about the origins of the coronavirus that broke out in the mainland in December 2019.
The US has also been critical about its mistreatment of Uighur Muslims and Beijing imposing the national security law on Hong Kong, which undermines its semi-autonomous state.
As per the piece in the China Daily, China had “limited ability” to provide protection to these Chinese companies by retaliating against US companies because the United States had technological superiority and influence with its allies.
Trump insisting that any sale of TikTok’s US operations would have to include a substantial payment to the US was “open robbery," tweeted Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a tabloid backed by the Communist Party of China.
