In the last months of his mandate, the administration of former US President Donald Trump had approved various measures to ban some apps of Chinese companies in the United States, especially TikTok, a social network of short videos, and WeChat, one of the apps. messages used worldwide, especially in China and in Chinese communities abroad. For TikTok, in particular, the situation had been particularly complicated and tense: the administration had threatened to completely block the app unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns it, had not sold all its operations in the United States.
In reality, the Trump administration has never succeeded (or never really had the political will) to put the blockades into practice: now the Biden administration, which succeeded it, is re-evaluating all measures and, according to American newspapers , has “paused” the bans. The sale of the US operations of TikTok, which seemed well advanced and on which an agreement had been reached, is also suspended for now.
TikTok's situation is the most complex: in August last year, Trump signed an executive order banning any US person or company from doing business with ByteDance, effectively blocking the application for US users. United. The main reason was that, according to the US government, TikTok could have posed a threat to national security: because it holds a large amount of US citizen data and the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government would put this data at risk.
A few days after Trump's executive order, the United States Foreign Investment Commission (CFIUS), which monitors national security issues in foreign trade, had formally ordered ByteDance to sell its activity in the United States.
After a very complicated month, ByteDance had reached an agreement to bring two large American investors, the cloud company Oracle and the supermarket chain Walmart, into the shareholding, giving them the management (but not the ownership) of the international part of the business. . The agreement had received the general approval of the Trump administration, which, however, had then reneged on the word while the Chinese government, which should have agreed in any case, never expressed itself.
– Read also: The point about the agreement between TikTok and Oracle
While waiting to close the deal, the Trump administration had repeatedly postponed the implementation of the TikTok ban, and the CFIUS had ignored the time limits that the commission itself had imposed to close the deal. Furthermore, as the autumn progressed, Trump had begun to focus more and more on the presidential election campaign, ignoring TikTok and other issues.
Meanwhile, TikTok had gone to a Washington appeals court to overrule the enforcement order on the grounds that it violated the company's freedom of expression. The court had rightly agreed to TikTok in two sentences, one in November and one in December of 2020. The Trump administration had appealed.
At the end of January, with the end of Trump's mandate, TikTok had not been blocked, and indeed had on his side a couple of judicial sentences defending him from the blockade, while the process of selling the US operations decreed by CFIUS had not yet been completed. concluded: in practice Trump had left all the decisions to be made on the issue to his successor Joe Biden.
The new president could have eliminated Trump's executive orders, as he has done in other cases, but instead decided to keep them and, rather, to ask for time.
Last week, the Biden administration's Justice Department asked the two appellate tribunals in which the US government's appeal against the two rulings in favor of TikTok is being discussed to suspend the debate, because a full review of it is underway. all the measures taken by Trump in the last months of his mandate regarding China. “A review of the bans could reduce the issues presented or eliminate the need for court intervention altogether,” the request reads. Jennifer Psaki, the White House spokesperson, said last week that the administration also asked the CFIUS to review the case, and this could fundamentally change or eliminate the agreement between TikTok and Oracle altogether.
The request for suspension came just in time, because the US government would have had to defend the appeals filed by the previous administration in court by February 18.
With WeChat, the Biden administration behaved similarly: in the fall Trump signed an executive order to ban it, the app had some judicial victories, and Biden's Justice Department asked for time to review the case. It is not yet clear, however, what Biden intends to do with a further executive order from Trump, signed in early January, which bans a series of Chinese payment apps, including AliPay and WeChat Pay: it should go into effect on February 19.
The Biden administration's decision to reevaluate Trump's measures against Chinese companies one by one, rather than eliminate them altogether as it did with other controversial measures, is an indicator of the new president's ambivalent attitude towards his predecessor's Chinese policy. . On the one hand, Biden and his advisers are convinced that Trump's toughness against China is right in principle, as his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said during his Senate confirmation hearing; on the other hand, they strongly disagree on methods and implementation, and need time to reformulate a new policy.
– Read also: What will Biden do with China?
Furthermore, the relationship with China is a particularly sensitive issue in American politics. For example, the confirmation in the Senate of Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce, was particularly complicated by controversies over the treatment that the administration intended to reserve for the Chinese technology company Huawei, and was released only after Raimondo promised that he would keep the Trump-imposed trade ban that prevents Huawei from doing business with American companies.
As for TikTok, therefore, according to analysts, the Biden administration will try to limit the risks posed by the app, imposing new rules on transparency or even intervening on the ownership of the app. The Wall Street Journal wrote a few days ago that the negotiations between the company and the CFIUS have never stopped, but that it is unlikely, by now, that the ban threatened by Trump and perhaps even the sale to Oracle will ever be implemented. .
– Read also: Is Huawei in trouble on 5G?
