TikTok owner says US wants to ban the app, not buy it

By: Nicolas V.

The CEO of TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, said he believes the United States is trying to kill the wildly popular app as President Trump presses for a sale and a cut of the proceeds from it.

In a leaked e-mail to Chinese employees on Monday, CEO Zhang Yiming — who has been criticized in China after news broke that he was in talks to sell at least a portion of TikTok’s business to Microsoft — said some people had misconceptions about the talks, and called a forced sale “unreasonable,” according to a copy of the message published by Bloomberg.

“But this is not their goal, or even what they want,” he wrote. “Their real objective is to achieve a comprehensive ban.”

Since Monday, some Chinese users have said they would delete ByteDance’s apps from their phones because they believe the company had given in too quickly to Washington. Others urged ByteDance to learn from Google, which pulled its search engine out of China in 2010, rather than selling off its Chinese operations, after Beijing authorities told it to censor its search results.

“I actually understand [the criticism],” Zhang said in the e-mail. “People have high expectations of a company founded by a Chinese person which is going global but have little information about it. With lots of grievances toward the US government, they tend to lash out at us with harsh criticism.”

Chinese media branded the US a “rogue country” late Monday after Trump proposed that the federal government take a cut in a forced sale of TikTok to Microsoft. The critics said that would amount to “an open robbery.”

“The world is watching and God is watching how President Trump is turning the once great America into a rogue country,” tweeted Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Chinese state mouthpiece Global Times.

Trump said Monday he wanted to see the app owned by “a very American company,” and said TikTok would be “out of business in the United States” by Sept. 15 if it did not reach a deal for a sale.

The US government should receive a cut from any sale because he made it “possible for this deal to happen” and TikTok doesn’t “have any rights unless we give it to them,” Trump said.

TikTok has been the subject of escalating scrutiny from US officials over concerns that the Chinese Communist Party could force ByteDance to give up valuable user information.

Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have suggested the app pipes data to the CCP. TikTok denies that.