BEIJING: China on Monday slammed Washington for using "digital gunboat diplomacy" after US President Donald Trump ordered TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to sell its interest within the Musical.ly app it bought and merged with TikTok.
As tensions soar between the world's two biggest economies, Trump has claimed TikTok might be employed by China to trace the locations of federal employees, build dossiers on people for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
The order issued late Friday builds on sweeping restrictions issued last week by Trump that TikTok and WeChat end all operations within the US.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Monday said "freedom and security are merely excuses for a few US politicians to pursue digital gunboat diplomacy" — pertaining to vessels employed by Western imperial powers during the nineteenth century, which China considers a deeply humiliating period in its history.
TikTok — which isn't available in China — has sought to distance itself from its Chinese owners.
Zhao said TikTok had done everything required by the US, including hiring only Americans as its top executives, hosting its servers within the US and making public its ASCII text file .
But the app has been "unable to flee the robbery through trickery undertaken by some people within the US supported bandit logic and political self-interest", Zhao said at a daily news conference .
ByteDance bought karaoke video app Musical.y from a Chinese rival about three years ago during a deal valued at nearly a billion dollars. it had been incorporated into TikTok, which became a worldwide sensation — particularly among younger users.
The order, set to require effect in 90 days, retroactively prohibits the acquisition and bars ByteDance from having any interest in Musical.ly.
Trump ordered that any sale of interest in Musical.ly within the US had to be signed off on by the Committee on Foreign Investment, which is to tend access to ByteDance books.
TikTok appointed former Disney executive Kevin Mayer, an American, as its new chief executive in May, and also withdrew from Hong Kong shortly after China imposed a controversial new security law on the town .
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