How China already controls a whole generation here
BACK in the 1950s, a group of academics, politicians and writers set up the Committee on the Present Danger, which was designed to warn of the threat posed to democracy and the West by communist subversion. With hindsight, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 looked inevitable. But it was no such thing: there were many naive fools in the West who refused to acknowledge the extent of Soviet sabotage of key Western institutions, and it was a constant battle to defeat it.
Plus ça change. Today it’s not the Soviet Union but China that poses the threat. Yesterday’s statement by Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden made clear some of this.
Chinese influence on academia, for example – essentially throwing huge amounts of cash at it in return for compliance – is a huge issue. But the greatest threat to the West is hiding in plain sight. Imagine if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled the BBC, ITV and Sky, as well as NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox. It’s unimaginable, isn’t it?
Except that’s more or less exactly where we now are. Generation Z (people in their mid-20s or younger) spends an astonishing 10 per cent of its waking hours on TikTok, the Chinese created, owned and – much as they deny it – obviously controlled social media platform. TikTok is Gen Z’s version of TV channels. Most of us do not grasp the sheer dominance of it in their digital lives. Nothing else compares.
IT IS an act of supreme folly that we have allowed the CCP such direct influence on an entire generation. Indeed, data compiled by Google is reported to show that TikTok is now the main internet access point for 40 per cent of Gen Z. This is why it was banned on UK government devices last March and why other countries, including the US and Germany, are taking action on the app. But some MPs still have accounts. They should beware. TikTok makes the USSR’s attempts at subversion look pathetic. Through its algorithms, TikTok feeds a poison designed to destabilise the West into young minds.
Last November, for example, posts with the hashtag #lettertoamerica pushed the notorious letter by Osama bin Laden in which he outlined his worldview to over 10 million users.
To be clear: no one has yet been able to prove that the CCP controls TikTok. But that’s the point – if everyone could see it, it wouldn’t be much use as a tool for subversion.
The Chinese state has the power to mandate Chinese tech companies’ behaviour through Article VII of the national intelligence law. And Chinese premier Xi Jinping has been open about the CCP’s aim. In 2013 he called the internet “the main battlefield in the battle for public opinion… online public opinion work should be taken as the top priority of propaganda and ideological work.
“Many people, especially young people, do not read mainstream media and get most of their information from the internet.We must face up to this fact, increase investment and seize the initiative.”
They have done just that. We know, as Mr Dowden showed us yesterday, that the CCP uses espionage as a key tool to destabilise the West. TikTok takes this to an even more dangerous level. In US elections in 2022 it pushed videos attacking politicians discussing key social issues without any clue that these were put together by Chinese state-controlled accounts.
In January, an academic calculated that TikTok videos tagged #StandWithPalestine received more than 10 times the views of those tagged #StandWithIsrael. Not because there is some reason why Gen Z will support Hamas rather than Israel but because the platform on which Gen Z obtain their news and commentary around it is a tool of the CCP.
The point is made even more obviously when you look at the domestic Chinese version, Douyin. Under 14s are only allowed access for 40 minutes a day.There are five-second delays if a user starts scrolling for too long – in contrast to TikTok’s algorithm which encourages users to scroll as long as possible.
THE Douyin algorithm also promotes videos of patriotism and social cohesion along with scientific, educational and historical content. It’s as if China is exporting a digital form of opium to the West while fiercely protecting its own people from it.
The CCP is being allowed to shape the outlook of the next generation of political, business and civic leaders. We must act. Two weeks ago the US House of Representatives passed a bill requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to sell or be banned in the US. We should do the same.
‘Most of us do not grasp the sheer dominance of it in their lives’