TikTok Tick Tock: Siege Of TikTok Reminds Us That Its Largest Cause Was The Epoch-Defining Rise Of China
By
Mukul Kesavan
17.03.24
Historians Will Find Many Reasons For The End
Of This American Era, But The Siege Of TikTok Reminds Us That Its Largest Cause
Was The Epoch-Defining Rise Of China And America’s Unwillingness To Deal With China
On Level Terms.
------
The West’s
hegemony after World War II rested on two claims: its ideological sponsorship
of a globalised economy and its claim to being the guardian of international
law. Both claims had become frayed over the years and in 2024 they came undone.
America’s assault on TikTok and its complicity in genocidal violence in Gaza
are two contrasting but connected symptoms of the dissolution of the US-led
world order.
Final
rites
Sourced
by the Telegraph
------
Till the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the hypocrisies of the West were discounted by
the reality of the Cold War. The Cold War was sold as an existential conflict,
a life-and-death struggle that justified the napalming of Vietnam, murderous
counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia, violent coups that overset democratic
governments in Iran and Chile and the embrace of apartheid South Africa. Not
everyone accepted the ‘free world’ at its own evaluation, but within its
borders it was incontestably freer than its ideological enemy,
actually-existing communism.
The end of
Soviet communism deprived the West of this get-out-of-jail card but for the
first twenty years after the Wall came down, this didn’t matter because America
was the world’s solitary hyper power and its world order was the only game in
town. Manmohan Singh’s eagerness to tilt towards the US in the Noughties was
just one instance of this geopolitical reality: countries had a choice of
sheltering under America’s umbrella as an ally or a client, or risk becoming
roadkill like Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya.
Historians
will find many reasons for the end of this American era, but the siege of
TikTok reminds us that its largest cause was the epoch-defining rise of China
and America’s unwillingness to deal with China on level terms. The US
government’s willingness to curb China’s technological and trading clout
through bans and restrictions isn’t new. The bans that most Western countries
imposed, prompted by the US, on the integration of 5G technology from China
into Western networks, the ban on gadgets and appliances manufactured by
Huawei, were early instances of Western discomfort at being out-competed by
China.
Those
interdictions had a semi-plausible rationale; Chinese hardware in the West’s
digital plumbing might allow Beijing a backdoor into its data networks. The bid
to force the sale of TikTok to an American company or some pliant third-country
operator lacks even that pretext. Here the argument is that the algorithmic
secret sauce dreamt up by Chinese scientists has captured the American
imagination and that can’t be allowed. The solution is either a forced sale or
a total ban.
Consider
the implications of the ‘our young people are being seduced by alien Fu
Manchus’ argument. The American State and its giant tech companies are
conceding that ‘their algorithms’ are better than ‘our algorithms’. Failing a
forced sale, the US government will make app stores delete the TikTok app and
force internet service providers to block web access to TikTok, mimicking the
Chinese State which has erected a digital firewall that blocks insidious social
media platforms like Facebook and X from corrupting its citizens. The US, that
apostle of laissez-faire and free speech, now wants to save 170 million
American TikTok users from themselves by banning an app. It’s hard to be a
hegemon and a laughing stock at once.
One of the
arguments advanced for banning TikTok should the Chinese refuse to allow its
sale was that the content it had served up to its American users about the war
in Gaza was biased. The Economist, which has consistently promoted the
Anglo-American consensus that there should be no permanent ceasefire despite
the death toll till Hamas is eliminated, delicately observed that “some allege
a skew in TikTok’s Gaza coverage”. The anxiety induced in the Western
establishment when relatively small, non-Western platforms like Al Jazeera
broadcast alternative perspectives on geopolitics metastasizes into a panic
attack when a popular social media platform is seen to circumvent the
mainstream media’s consensus on shibboleths like Israel’s right to
self-defence, aka Gazan lives are cheap.
No one can
claim to fully understand the quasi-religious conviction of Western leaders
that Israel has a license to kill as many civilians as it likes in its pursuit
of Hamas. Israel is still killing civilians; it says it has readied a plan to
invade Rafah and Joe Biden continues to arm the Israel Defence Forces with the
weapons it uses to kill Gazans. The IDF’s indiscriminate bombardment and
barbaric gloating have been continuously visible on social media. South Africa
has leveraged international humanitarian law to accuse Israel in the
International Court of Justice of genocide. As a result, the West’s
indifference to non-Western suffering, its steadfast support of atrocities that
shred international humanitarian law, has been visible in real time, right
through the duration of this slaughter.
The
starkness of the West’s hypocrisy, its logistical support for war-making that
is plausibly genocidal, can’t be unseen. The belief that endured amongst the
opinion-making elites of the non-Western world that America and its allies
embodied, under their carapaces of self-interest and realpolitik, an aspiration
to a rights-based world and a rules-based order has been graphically shown to
be deluded. There is no holy Cold War to be invoked to buy Israel or the West
indulgences for these crimes, no ideological enemy who can be relied on to
collateralise this killing. China is an authoritarian State but it’s hard to
make people believe that the country that makes the world’s solar panels,
iPhones and washing machines is the devil incarnate.
Europe’s
politicians, across the ideological spectrum, are doing their best to fashion
an Islamist bogeyman out of the anti-war protests. In Britain, Lee Anderson,
Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have all done their bit to suggest that Muslims
protesting the war in Gaza harbour within their ranks extremists who threaten
the lives and political independence of members of Parliament. Three
calculating men, desperate to caveat any call for a ceasefire, yet willing to
play with fire.
Meanwhile,
Russia’s unending war on Ukraine demonstrates that a dollar-denominated world
economy and the threat of an American embargo cannot guarantee victory. If
anything, the war in Ukraine has given large, non-Western nations like India
and Turkey experience in circumventing (or ignoring) Western embargoes. As
Ukrainian forces retreat and their Western supporters begin to count the cost
of reclaiming every inch of ceded ground, military historians will chronicle
not the weapons the West gave but the weapons it withheld. A West that fails to
hold the line in Ukraine and draws no red lines in Gaza is a fitful, dangerous
power bloc, not a hegemon.
URL: https://newageislam.com/current-affairs/tiktok-siege-epoch-defining-rise-china/d/131938