Lhe debates around TikTok illustrate a strange hiatus between the nature of the overwhelming majority of its uses – a more or less joyful futility – and its spotlight in international relations. The upward trajectory of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, could soon symbolize the culmination of the Sino-Californian interdependencies which have abundantly nourished the American and Chinese digital capitalisms of the past twenty years, today challenged by the “decoupling technology between Washington and Beijing. Finally, the TikTok affair illustrates the convergence between the United States and Europe in the search for control of their respective addictions.
The first convergence concerns the perception of the Chinese threat. On the American side, a bipartisan observation establishes that the TikTok affair closes two decades of quasi- « business as usual » with China, where geopolitical considerations were certainly not absent from the equation, but remained subject to flows – human, technological and capital. The TikTok issue also sheds light on the Chinese policy of the Biden administration, which placed the application at the top of the spectrum of threat to the “national security”. The first social media born outside the United States capable of rivaling or even surpassing the platforms of Silicon Valley, TikTok comes to challenge the hegemony of the United States in the digital economy, a field which has allowed economic and military power American to reinvent itself. There is no doubt that the “imperative of innovation” will continue to guide the competition between Washington and Beijing, better than the classic logic of military rivalry, or even than the recurring commercial disputes between the two countries – TikTok is only a pawn here .
The American reading of the “TikTok threat” is partially shared on the European side, according to a color chart reflecting the complexities of the continent’s broader relationship with China. Diversely appreciated on this side of the Atlantic, the Sino-American competition fully illustrates the difficulty for Europeans to determine their commercial and strategic positioning in relation to China, while the latter aims to legitimize its techno-authoritarianism. France and Germany, in particular, maintain an ambivalent line towards Beijing, seeking to preserve bilateral economic relations and returning sensitive political issues to Brussels – including, precisely, digital issues.
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