Two years ago, the Chinese government said it would oppose any forced sale of TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, one of the country’s biggest internet companies.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against TikTok on Friday, Beijing could find itself in the position of deciding whether to try to block a sale.
TikTok has spent much of the last five years trying to deflect Washington’s concerns about its ties to China. It has moved staff outside China; explored deals with Microsoft and Oracle; and appointed a Singaporean chief executive, Shou Chew, who testified before Congress in 2023.
None of that relieved lawmakers’ fears that TikTok could be used to spread false information or give the Chinese government access to sensitive data about the app’s 170 million users in the United States. The Supreme Court has now upheld a law passed by Congress last year to force the sale of TikTok or see it banned.
Any sale or divestiture of TikTok would have to comply with China’s rules on technology exports, Shu Jueting, a spokeswoman for the ministry of commerce, told reporters in 2023.
Those rules say that the Chinese government must approve the export of a list of restricted technologies. Beijing claimed the last word in any deal involving TikTok when it updated that list in 2020 to include systems like the app’s algorithm, which recommends a constant stream of short videos targeted to keep people scrolling.