 This weekend, Trump raised the specter of a ban on the social media platform TikTok. We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things or a couple of options, but a lot of things are happening. So we'll see what happens. But we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok. So he left less room for doubt when speaking to reporters on Air Force One. So then instead of saying we're looking a lot of options, he said as far as TikTok is concerned, we're banning them from the United States. So I suppose no ambiguity there. The political incentives for such a move are obvious. He's about to fight a presidential campaign on the main issues of the day, the economy and coronavirus. It's going appallingly for him. He is tanking. He wants to change the subject and what better way to change the subject than to point at some country that you can make out to be an enemy and a threat. Unfortunately, he's also getting very little opposition on this point from his political opponents. This is Chuck Schumer, the Democrats leader in the Senate speaking on Sunday. I have been very opposed to TikTok. I was one of the first to expose the Chinese links. And I have urged that TikTok be closed down in America. There's a new proposal. Mnuchin and Meadows brought it up yesterday to have Microsoft take it over. There are some questions that have to be answered. How will the data be stored and secured? Will still the Chinese have links into TikTok? So before I would be for such a merger, I'd have to get some answers to these questions. The way he's exposed the Chinese links of TikTok. It's Chinese company. Everyone knew that. He just read The New York Times and then tweet about it. Who knows what he's talking about? Anyway, I mean, with Aaron, I'll talk a bit about the politicking of this in the United States. But first of all, I wanted to know the actual facts, not just, I suppose, whatever Donald Trump and Chuck Schumer are spouting. So earlier today, I spoke to Yuan Yang, who is the FT's Beijing Deputy Bureau Chief and also a tech correspondent. So the perfect person to speak to on this topic. So I started by asking her whether TikTok does pose any genuine security threat to users in the United States. So some US politicians have argued that TikTok could be spying on its users' data. Now, they haven't presented any evidence to show that this could be the case. So right now it's completely hypothetical. All the evidence that we do know so far of how TikTok the app works is that, yes, it takes user data and it siphons off huge amounts of user data. But that isn't so different to what existing US social media apps like Twitter, like Facebook already do. And that is simply the model of how social media apps monetize user data by selling it to advertisers or as Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism. That's the widespread model. Now, the added concern is, of course, for Chinese company that US users or US politicians fear that China, if it got its hands on this data, could be using it for other nefarious means. So far that is pure speculation. I think that rather than being a national security concern with evidence back that up, TikTok is instead being used as more of a political football to be kicked around. I mean, the other argument I've heard, which I didn't find that convincing, I have to admit was that they can control the algorithm. So the idea is you could have this Chinese company that's showing people, as was anti-American propaganda and hiding posts about the Uighurs, for example. I mean, again, is there any evidence for that at all? There is grounds for concern about Chinese censorship because partly because China censors so much data, so much content within its own borders. So Douyin, which is the Chinese internal equivalent of TikTok and was the kind of predecessor to TikTok, there's huge amounts of censorship on everything from the Uighur mass concentration camps in Xinjiang to the distance that have been locked up by the government, to Hong Kong independence on a huge range of political themes. Now, Biden say that they have separated out the non-China content moderation from the China content moderation. And we haven't seen any obvious and clear examples of political censorship on the app. There is the possibility that the algorithm could be tweaked and changed in a disinformation campaign, for example, to try and change the way that U.S. voters turn out. That hasn't been shown to be the case so far. And partly because the app's users are so young and usually are teenagers below voting age, I don't think it's as big a concern as the kind of clear disinformation campaigns that we can get on Twitter, which Twitter has also named and shamed, coming from China, coming from Russia that already exist. We've already seen now, just in the last year, the UK turning against Huawei, America sort of constantly expanding the list of companies it doesn't want to operate in the United States. Is this a serious problem for the Chinese economy? Or I suppose is it big enough to just go it alone at this point? I think Huawei and TikTok are very different when it comes to the impact on China's development. Huawei is much more important. It's a company that's built China's telecoms infrastructure. It's enabled the mobile revolution. It's built out all the internet coverage across vast ways of China, including rural parts of China that previously had no internet coverage. And because it's a manufacturing company, it makes smartphones, it makes telecoms masks. It also indirectly employs lots of factory workers. Now, ByteDance and TikTok is a very different, is in a very different situation. They are not actually making that much profit outside of China because they're still in the expansion phase of this new tech startup that's trying to gain users. They employ not that many people compared to a manufacturing company. They employ predominantly elite graduate students in big cities. So as a software company, they have much of a smaller impact on China's economy. Now, there is a class of people within China that will be affected by the threatened ban and by this potential sale. And those are going to be the young entrepreneurs often who have been educated abroad, who've been sold this idea that they can be international citizens, that they can play on a level playing field with their American counterparts. And culturally speaking, those kinds of young Chinese entrepreneurs are going to be much more similar to their Silicon Valley counterparts than to any other part of China's political class. They're going to be born after the 70s or after the 80s, the younger generation of entrepreneurs, and they will be very disappointed. But they are not President Xi and the Communist Party's main audience for its policies. The Communist Party still has its biggest groundswell of support among rural farmers, among people who have seen their livelihoods changed over the last few decades by the party and increasingly is facing more discontent from this elite class from the university educated groups in China. So although that group of entrepreneurs is going to be disappointed and I think they would quite rightfully feel a grievance about the US closing its doors to them, they're not the major concern of the Communist Party yet. That was Yuan Yang, Deputy Beijing Bureau Chief of the FT speaking to me from Beijing earlier today. Aaron, I want to go to you, sort of to talk about the politics of this in the West, I suppose, because what you're seeing in the United States is there's complete bipartisan consensus on the idea of being really hawkish about China. So you saw at the beginning that, you know, Donald Trump was trying to target Biden, seeing a weakness for him is that potentially he's soft on China. Biden doing adverts sort of saying that actually, no, Donald Trump is soft on China is this huge race to be toughest. Who can be toughest on China? And it seems like I don't know where it really ends. I can understand why they're all doing it. I can understand why Joe Biden and the Democrats are trying to close down any wedge issue they think Donald Trump might be able to find to win a new presidential term. But it also seems incredibly dangerous. Well, lots of this doesn't make sense. You know, there's a story a few days ago in the garden about the Five Eyes Network, which is Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, which is effectively a signal intelligence network, a spying network. They share lots of surveillance data, primarily the Americans and the British are generating that, obviously. They were saying this could be expanded to a kind of some kind of trade area. There'd be a pooling of resources because obviously people are saying, you know, people are very keen to boycott China until they recognize the fact that it's got 90% of the world's known deposits of rare earth minerals. Or the fact that, you know, is Australia really going to say goodbye to China when it's number one economic market? It's number one trade partner is China. You know, after 2008 without the export of primary mineral resources to mainland China, the Australian economy would have been in the gutter. And so it's a really strange moment. And it's kind of unique in the last several hundred years in that for many countries, their primary military partner is the United States, right? For Australia, its primary military partner is the United States. However, its primary economic partner is China. And what this is doing is actually drawing out a really difficult contradiction there. Now, somewhere like Britain, it's not such a big problem. I mean, we're in the North Atlantic. But for Australia, for Canada to an extent, for New Zealand, for pretty much all of Asia, for many European countries, for European countries, Iran, the Middle East, Central Asia, you know, it's pretty clear what the center of economic gravity is for them. Anybody that's exporting mineral resources from copper and chili to, you know, Central African Republic and Bork site or Australia, they're looking to China. They're not going to sever economic ties with China. Then when it comes to social networks, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, the data from this is going to be powering the deep learning tools of the next 10, 20 years, basic artificial intelligence. And if we look at it, it's a cliche, but it's true. We look at data like oil, it's a hugely valuable resource. Where is this data coming from? It's coming from, like I say, Google, YouTube, Facebook. That's where real value is going to be accumulated over the next couple of decades because it's what's going to power artificial intelligence, deep, these deep learning, machine learning tools and technologies. Now, you need large numbers of people to have an effective AI industry, which means that fundamentally in the 21st century, the two big AI superpowers will be the United States and China because they don't just have the technology, the capital, the know-how, which both do. They also have huge data sets, right? They have huge domestic consumer markets. Now, China has 1.3 billion people. The U.S. is 300 million people. I don't think the U.S. is going to win this game if it tries to isolate China with its big domestic market of 1.3 billion people. It's growing. Consumer demand is still increasing. It's still a growing market. Maybe a year ago, this might have made some sense. But now, when America's economy is going into the gutter and Anglo-American political leadership is falling away, people are saying China will be the world's largest economy by 2030 on price purchasing parity already is. But on nominal GDP, people are saying by 2030, COVID might accelerate that by five years. And so, it's not such a simple assumption that Australia will just dismiss China and plump for, you know, the Anglo countries when it comes to both military and economic relations. That's not necessarily going to be priced in. And if they do do it, there's going to have major consequences for five, 10 years, which I would submit would probably generate a domestic political kickback. So, it's a really big moment. You know, the big development of the last 400, 500 years, the biggest development, really, certainly for the last 200, 300 years. And because we're living in it, we don't think about it, is the rise of China as a political power, but also as a military and maritime power. You know, it wasn't that, it's never been that before. The idea of China having global military reach, it's never had that before, it never wanted it before. And so, these are really, really unprecedented times. And I think for America, it's not just about political leadership, economic leadership, and military leadership. It's also that technological leadership. And the story of TikTok is how all of this intersects and dovetails.