Singapore: Three hours after Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced a ban on Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok on government devices, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reportedly received an in-principle invitation to Beijing.
The ban, which until last year would likely have been met with swift condemnation and potential retaliation by the Chinese government, was greeted with little more than a whimper: “TikTok general manager in Australia and New Zealand: very disappointed,” headlined the Global Times, Beijing’s most aggressive state media outlet.
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company had already weathered bans on government devices in the United States and Canada in February, and the United Kingdom, European Union, New Zealand and Belgium in March.
Australia, once a leader of COVID-19 inquiries, foreign interference legislation and a ban on Huawei, has fallen back in the peloton.
With a prime ministerial visit to Beijing in the second half of this year, the Albanese government is treading carefully by taking diplomatic protection by following others where it can.
Having endured $20 billion in trade strikes, a three-year ministerial freeze and helped awaken leaders in Europe and North America to Beijing’s coercive tactics, the loudest voices in the global China debate are no longer in Canberra, they are in Washington and Brussels.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
“China has now turned the page on the era of ‘reform and opening’ and is moving into a new era of security and control,” European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said last week. She is due to arrive in Beijing on Wednesday.
The Biden administration has threatened to extend the ban to all devices in the US unless ByteDance divests its stake and places the video-sharing app into a US-based company. That is likely to be an intolerable kowtow to US demands for ByteDance and the Chinese government.
Home Affairs Minister Claire O’Neill has so far maintained the government is not considering banning the popular app. If the US government moves on a blanket ban, will Australia follow?
TikTok has not done itself any favours. The world’s most downloaded app has denied it is a national security risk and said it will not share data with the Chinese government if asked.
But last year, ByteDance staff tracked the physical movements of a journalist covering the company’s links to China by accessing their data on TikTok.
In 2019, internal guidelines revealed TikTok was censoring Tiananmen Square protests, Tibetan independence and the religious group Falun Gong. The company claimed they were outdated and the journalist’s tracking was due to misconduct by a “few individuals”.
TikTok’s Singaporean chief executive Shou Zi Chew defended the company at a US Congress hearing in March and in a bid to stave off a ban or divestment said that a $US1.5 billion ($2.2 billion) overhaul, dubbed Project Texas, would “seal off protected US user data from unauthorised foreign access”.
“It is our commitment to this committee and all our users that we will keep TikTok free from any manipulation by any government,” he said.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew defends the company at a US Congress hearing in March.Credit:AP
There lies the great schism at the heart of this new technological Cold War – the inescapable reality that the parent company of one of the world’s most popular and innovative apps is headquartered in a country led by an authoritarian government.
Like Huawei, before it, it is now on the brink of being forced out of its largest international markets because it cannot make politicians in foreign lands trust what it says.
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