The White House i.e. office of the president of the United States of America indicated on Wednesday 15th July 2020 that a decision regarding Chinese mobile apps including TikTok would be taken within weeks. The Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told media reporters aboard the Air Force One that-
“I do not think there is any self-imposed deadline for action, but I think we are looking at weeks, not months. There are a number of administration officials who are looking at the national security risk as it relates to TikTok, WeChat and other apps that have the potential for national security exposure, specifically as it relates to the gathering of information on American citizens by a foreign adversary,"
The advocacy for this move has increasingly gained momentum after the Indian government passed a decision to ban 50 Chinese apps including TikTok. The Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an online interview with the Economic Club of New York said that-
“They (Indians) made the decision that they were going to pull 50 or so Chinese applications off the systems that were operating inside India. They did not do that because the United States told them to. They did it because they could see the threat to the Indian people from the Chinese Communist Party”
The American regime said that it has been closely working with India across a broad spectrum of full-range international partnerships to assist the Asian country in making sure that they have all the necessary information to make good decisions.
Earlier this month, the Secretary of State informed that the US may ban TikTok. He said-
“I made a comment about TikTok. But we got to go back to principles first. The mission set is to protect American national security. And in this case, the information of American citizens. So, whether it is TikTok or any of the other Chinese communications platforms, apps, infrastructure -- this administration has taken seriously the requirement to protect the American people from having their information end up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party”
The Trump administration is working with a process for all relevant agencies and private sectors to present their opinions. It hopes to have a set of decisions shortly, which will reflect the Federal standing.
“We have been working on ZTE, we have been working on Huawei. We are pleased to see the United Kingdom make its announcement that it is going to pull out Huawei technology from its telecom infrastructure. We watched telecom companies all across the world from Orange and others to say no, we understand” Pompeo said.
“We want to make sure that our data flows only across trusted vendors. That is the mission set and that is certainly the mission set when it comes to applications that our kids may be touching” he added.
In the era of rising xenophobia and nationalistic attitude in countries throughout the world, these hostilities between superpowers will affect their business as well and only make operations tougher. Moreover, the loss of trust of the entire world in the Chinese government is expected to cast a looming shadow on the flourishing Chinese economy.
