The Digital War Is Increasingly Fierce

After a series of historical retaliation against the U.S.-China diplomacy, such as the closure of each other's consulate, the relationship between the two superpowers has not cooled down and tended to increase tension in the confrontation early in the digital world.

Washington is gearing up to take specific action against Chinese software companies that are seen as a "US national security threat" like TikTok and WeChat.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed on Tuesday that President Donald Trump is about to "strike a decisive blow" to not only China's tech giants, such as two social networks with billions of users, TikTok and WeChat. Besides, a series of other software companies will be "touched" by the US if accused of providing data directly to China, posing a security threat to the US.

According to Washington, sensitive and personal data of hundreds of millions of users in the US such as facial recognition, home address and contact phone numbers, have been collected by Chinese software for several years by the White House boss said that this situation lasted long enough "was enough" and need to be stopped early.

Specifically, President Donald Trump announced that he would ban TikTok door in the US despite the Chinese short video sharing application pledging to keep user data confidential. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also confirmed the decisive move, citing information that tens of millions of US users are at risk of being sent back to China for intelligence operations.

So after Huawei, another big Chinese tech company is facing a scenario that has been cornered by US authorities. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, recently agreed to sell all its stake in the application to Microsoft, through which TikTok will become a 100% US company and avoid President Donald Trump's ban. However, with the current context of US-China relations being at the bottom, analysts are skeptical of the possibility of success of this "escape body".

Earlier, the Homeland Security Committee and the Senate government on July 22 approved a bill banning U.S. employees and government officials from using TikTok, paving the way for stronger steps toward application. of China. TikTok currently has about 1 billion users worldwide, including more than 26 million users in the US.

Washington's ongoing pressure on Chinese-rich software and technology companies such as TikTok has been cited as being "destabilizing America's national security". However, according to analysts this is not the only cause but also because TikTok is emerging as a direct competitor to the US technology giants such as Facebook and Google.

Therefore, the deadly American strikes against Huawei before or hanging on TikTok's head are now just the tip of the iceberg in the fierce US-China digital war. The future of the world belongs to digital transformation, so the technological confrontation between the two great powers of the United States and China is inevitable. Meanwhile, global nations and businesses cannot stand out but will be caught up in this digital war because of the choice of faction to survive.