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https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X211013919
Media International Australia
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DOI: 10.1177/1329878X211013919
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Corresponding author:
Dianlin Huang, Institute of Communication Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing, 100024, China.
Email: dianlinhuang@cuc.edu.cn
1013919MIA0010.1177/1329878X211013919Media International AustraliaMiao et al.
research-article2021
Original Article
More than business: The
de-politicisation and re-politicisation
of TikTok in the media
discourses of China, America
and India (2017–2020)
Weishan Miao
Institute of Journalism and Communication, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China
Dianlin Huang
Communication University of China, China
Ying Huang
Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, China
Abstract
Although TikTok has in recent years become a highly popular yet controversial digital platform,
few empirical studies have examined its development and the challenges it faces. In this article, we
investigate how major media in China, the United States and India have interpreted and responded
to the rise of TikTok, based on an analysis of news articles from 2017 to 2020. We identify the
dynamic discursive practices of the de-politicisation and re-politicisation of TikTok before and
after 2020. In the earlier stage, rather than being framed as a political issue, TikTok was depicted
as an unexpected business miracle. However, since 2020, TikTok has been increasingly embedded
in the escalating geo-political tensions between China and the other two countries. By highlighting
how TikTok shifted from being an ambitious digital platform to a state-centred security issue,
we suggest that the political dimension, especially the state–enterprise relationship, is crucial to
understanding the discourse regarding internationalisation of the Chinese Internet.
Keywords
geo-politics, internationalisation, media discourse, the Chinese Internet, TikTok
2 Media International Australia 00(0)
Introduction
In June 2020, the Indian government banned 59 Chinese software applications, including the popu-
lar short video platform TikTok, which were accused of not only infringing on the data safety of
local users, but also threatening the ‘national security and sovereignty’ of India (PTI, 2020). In late
July, US President Donald Trump announced that TikTok would be banned in the United States out
of national security concerns. This series of explosive developments made TikTok the focus of
global media coverage. It is easy to treat these events as another case of a rising China being curbed
by cautious Western powers. However, little serious empirical research has been conducted on the
development of TikTok and the challenges it has faced. Studies have either focused on the motiva-
tion and behavioural patterns of TikTok users (e.g. Lu et al., 2020; Mackenzie and Nichols, 2020;
Omar and Dequan, 2020; Shao and Lee, 2020; Zhou, 2019) or have analysed video content of a
specific type (Chen et al., 2020; Fischer, 2020; Khattab, 2020; Serrano et al., 2020). We know little
about some fundamental issues, such as how TikTok has been perceived in different countries and
how political controversy about the application has emerged and gained prominence.
To fill this gap, we investigate how media discourses in China, the United States and India have
reacted to TikTok’s global rise. This article analyses this issue through a discursive approach, see-
ing discourse as social practice (Fairclough, 1992) which not only reflects reality but also influ-
ences, constructs and produces it. On one hand, the mass media, especially the mainstream
newspapers, remain an important source of knowledge for the general public. They influence the
public’s understanding, perception and action on particular issues by setting agenda and providing
frames. For example, as framing theory reminds us, the discourse of news coverage can give a
topic specific meaning and influence public attitudes by emphasising salience of different aspects
of a topic (Entman, 2004). On the other hand, there is no single, completely dominant discourse, as
discursive practices are themselves processes of expression, contestation and negotiation by mul-
tiple actors, especially in the case of emerging and controversial topics. Through this process,
power, relations and norms are established. The controversies associated with TikTok are undoubt-
edly embedded in a complex network of international relations, geopolitics and global Internet
governance. Through discourse analysis, we are able to understand how different national media
and political actors understand, interpret and construct the complex relationship between technol-
ogy and national and global politics at a discursive level.
Specifically, we collected and examined 363 news reports from major newspapers in the three
countries, covering the period from September 2017 to July 2020, to answer the following ques-
tions: What major themes have emerged from the media discourses regarding TikTok specifically
and the internationalisation of the Chinese Internet in general? How has the rise of TikTok been
interpreted and addressed in different countries? In terms of the relations between technology, geo-
politics and the global communication order, what are the implications of the case of TikTok?
This article is anchored in the context of China’s Internet internationalisation. With 904 million
Internet users (CNNIC, 2020) served by a vibrant Internet industry, China is one of the engines
driving the global digital economy (BGC, 2017). However, because of the Great Firewall, which
regulates its digital connection with the outside world, curiosity, speculation and confusion have
surrounded the Chinese Internet. The Chinese Internet has long been regarded as lacking creativity,
just mimicking what the American Internet giants have done. In addition, many studies have
focused on China’s regulation of the Internet, such as censorship and online activism (Herold and
De Seta, 2015; Kluver and Yang, 2005; Qiu and Chan, 2004). However, the global popularity of
Chinese digital platforms such as TikTok not only demonstrates the innovation and competitive-
ness of the Chinese Internet industry, but also serves as a reminder that it is vital to shift our atten-
tion from its domestic development to its global expansion.
Miao et al. 3
More theoretically, we contribute to the discussion about the dynamic state–industry relation-
ship in a complex geo-political context. The Chinese economy is not just dependent on enterprises,
but on the relationships between the state and the enterprises in a specific industry (Huang, 2017),
as the critical difference between cultural and technological companies in China and elsewhere is
the intrusive role of the state (De Kloet and Fung, 2017). However, studies have tended to simplify
the relationship between the Chinese government and Internet companies as one of government
control. In fact, it is a mutually beneficial political–economic alliance, with the government bene-
fitting from the increased political legitimacy gained by improving China’s economy and compa-
nies benefitting from stable, ever-increasing profits (Miao et al., 2020).
TikTok represents an entirely different path for the global expansion of the Chinese Internet
industry. In the case of a Chinese enterprise that has gone global, such as Huawei and ZTE, its
growth and development are closely related to China’s national interests (Shen, 2020). However,
TikTok has adopted a quite different approach of de-sinicisation by attempting to dilute or even
conceal its connection with the Chinese government, or China as its country of origin. However, in
recent political and media discourses about TikTok, re-politicisation or re-sinicisation – that is, re-
establishing the connection between TikTok and China or even equating TikTok with the Chinese
government – has become the main discursive strategy for those attempting to attack, investigate
or ban the application. This reflects the complicated relationship between politics, business and
technology in an increasingly tense geo-political context, a dimension largely neglected in the
literature.
Literature review
Shifts in the state–industry relationship of the Chinese Internet
Most of the controversy about TikTok revolves around its Chinese origin. The underlying assump-
tion is that Chinese Internet companies are usually under strict government supervision, and there-
fore are likely to transmit user data to the Chinese government, thereby endangering user privacy
and even the national security of the countries where they operate. In this section, from a historical
and contextual perspective, we aim to complicate this oversimplistic model of the controlling rela-
tionship between the Chinese government and Internet companies. Our discussion also maps the
political, economic and cultural background of the development of Chinese Internet companies to
better understand the environment in which internationalised Chinese social media platforms such
as TikTok develop their strategies and characteristics.
We can roughly divide the development of China’s Internet into three stages based on the role
of the government. The first began in the late 1980s, when the government actively promoted
China’s access to the global Internet (Shen, 2017) and organised the construction of related infra-
structures (Miao et al., 2018). During this period, the Chinese Internet was still in its early stages
of technological development, but it had the crucial political mission of catching up with Western
developed countries and realising modernisation.
The second stage began in the late 1990s, as China’s commercial Internet companies developed
rapidly. In this stage, Internet services focused on news, information sharing and public discussion.
The government regarded it as just a new type of mass media; consequently, it transplanted the
regulatory principles used to manage traditional media to the Internet (Ang, 1997; Miao and Ang,
2016) and focused on controlling politically and ideologically subversive content (Yang, 2009).
Since 2010, the government has considered the rapid development of the Internet economy to
be the key to the nation’s economic transformation and restructuring. A mutually beneficial alli-
ance between the government and Internet companies has emerged. Internet companies have
4 Media International Australia 00(0)
developed various ways to cooperate with the government in exchange for legitimacy and policy
support. The government has also been working hard to help Chinese Internet companies expand,
especially in overseas markets (Negro, 2017).
However, the government’s support does not mean it has relaxed its political and ideological
control over these companies. On the contrary, since 2013, ideological control has been tightened
in the context of national security (Yang, 2014). This environment has further strengthened the
pragmatic partnership between Chinese Internet companies and the government. Under this model,
these companies tend to focus on services that promote consumption and entertainment. Not only
have the B.A.T. (Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba) become symbols and representatives of China’s
Internet industry, but new Internet companies represented by ByteDance have also emerged.
To sum up, in contrast to the view that Chinese Internet companies and the government are in
opposition, we emphasise that they are an alliance that continually seeks the maximum mutual
benefit. However, this does not mean that we should equate the two. First, this relationship is not
static, but full of changes, negotiations and even contradictions. Second, there is power asymmetry
in this relationship. Although companies have agency and actively engage with stakeholders,
including the government, to maximise their own interests, they largely occupy a relatively weaker
position compared with the state. Third, this relationship is deeply shaped by the common eco-
nomic interests of the government and companies. As Qi and Li (2020) found, the role of the
Chinese government in the internationalisation of Chinese Internet companies promotes their
breadth but limits their depth. When alliance with the government is no longer a necessary condi-
tion for their survival or even hinders their development, Internet companies may take measures to
disassociate themselves from the government. This is exactly what TikTok has done with its de-
politicisation strategy for its global development.
However, no matter how TikTok tries to downplay its Chinese background and its relationship
with the Chinese government, it cannot change the fact that it has developed in the historical and
social context outlined above. Its development has benefitted from the government’s supportive
policy environment for the digital economy. Thus, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance can-
not entirely ignore the expectations and requirements of the Chinese government and, as an inter-
nationalised Internet company with a Chinese background, it will inevitably incur distrust and even
hostility from foreign governments. We therefore cannot fully understand TikTok’s international
development strategy and the ensuing disputes without considering the larger context of govern-
ment–company relations.
The road to internationalisation: embedding the Internet in geo-political tension
Once TikTok became a global phenomenon, it became subject not only to domestic political eco-
nomic forces, but also to international relations and associated discursive contestation. In this sec-
tion, we shift our focus from the domestic environment to the global context, especially recent
geo-political tensions, to understand the controversies about TikTok.
Before further examining the case of TikTok, it is necessary to take a brief look at the interna-
tionalisation of China’s Internet industry. Although this trend can be traced back to the late 1990s,
when Chinese enterprises were encouraged to ‘go out’ (Hong, 2017), it was in the 2010s that
Chinese Internet companies took substantial steps to internationalise. Before this, they were not
very interested in overseas markets, because China’s domestic market was large enough to meet
their development needs (Negro, 2017). However, as most major Western social media platforms
were expelled from Mainland China after 2010, local Internet companies have since developed
rapidly and internationalisation has become increasingly important. In terms of strategies for going
abroad, Candelon et al. (2019) have identified four major types: (1) ‘local players’, maintaining
Miao et al. 5
local advantages with moderate overseas development, such as the video streaming platform iQiyi;
(2) ‘overseas investment’, investing heavily in the global market through mergers and acquisitions
of local companies, such as the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform Lazada; (3) ‘global coopera-
tion’, targeting overseas Chinese users, such as the travel service provider Ctrip International; and
(4) ‘external development’, extensively taping overseas markets, represented by the user-generated
content platform TikTok.
On the whole, the cross-border development of Chinese Internet companies has been unsatis-
factory. The exception is the fourth category, of which TikTok is undoubtedly the most successful
example. In terms of why TikTok has succeeded whereas other platforms have largely failed, most
analyses have focused on the business aspect, while another significant factor, geo-politics, is
often underestimated. TikTok’s recent global challenges highlight the importance of this neglected
factor.
Compared to traditional multinationals, Internet companies are more likely to be involved in
geo-political conflicts and power struggles. The reason is that the digital economy industry simul-
taneously involves multiple dimensions of the economy, culture, politics and ideology (Curran,
2012; Frau-Meigs et al., 2012; Jenkins, 2008). In this process, states have always been at the core
of the struggle. Some scholars accordingly conceptualise the geo-politics of the Internet as a pro-
cess of state-centred power struggle (Powers and Jablonski, 2015). The controversy surrounding
the global cyberspace order is thus considered to reflect the differing strengths of countries’ digital
industries. For example, Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese market (Schiller and Sandvig,
2010) and Huawei’s recent predicament in Western countries (Wen, 2017) both reflect a complex
geo-political struggle between major global powers.
Given the above discussion, we aim to examine why and how TikTok becomes a controversial
issue in a discursive dimension, with a focus on how different countries discursively construct the
dynamic relationship between the Chinese state and TikTok. We believe that analysing TikTok will
help us gain a better and deeper understanding of the internationalisation of the Chinese Internet in
specific, and the complex interaction between technology, geo-politics and global communication
order in general.
Methods and research design
To achieve our research goals, we selected major media reports on TikTok from China, the United
States and India from 1 September 2017 to 10 July 2020. The nearly 3-year time span ensures that
we can examine the changes in TikTok reports by major media outlets in the three countries from
a relatively comprehensive perspective.
In terms of newspaper selection, we sampled the most influential outlets in the three countries.
In China, we chose the ruling Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily and its tabloid affiliate Global
Times. In the United States, we chose the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, two prestigious
newspapers with high circulation and significant influence. In India, we chose the Times of India,
the country’s oldest English-language quality newspaper, with the largest circulation and far-reach-
ing social influence. It is needed to point out that our decision of only selecting one newspaper
from India was based on the following considerations: on one hand, the focus of this study is on
the comparative analysis of media discourses between the three countries, rather than on a com-
parison of media with different political biases in each country. Therefore, our sampling criteria are
circulation and influence of the newspapers. From this perspective, it is appropriate to select only
the Times of India, as it is the oldest, most widely circulated, representative and influential national
English-language newspaper in the country. On the other hand, as discussed below, because the
Times of India has a much larger number of reports on TikTok (n = 156) than those of the Chinese
6 Media International Australia 00(0)
(n = 114) and American (n = 93) newspapers, we decided to analyse only one Indian newspaper
for the sake of balancing the sample sizes of the three countries.
In terms of data collection, we used WiseSearch to retrieve Chinese news reports and Nexis
News Database for those from the United States and India. Regarding search keywords, we adopted
two methods for the Chinese case. First, we used ‘TikTok’ or ‘Tik Tok’, both of which are used by
Chinese media. Second, given the fact that the Chinese term Douyin guojiban (the international
version of Douyin) is often used to refer to TikTok, we searched by combining the keyword Douyin
with guoji (InternationalForum), haiwai (Strategy) and quanqiu (global) to obtain the most rele-
vant reports in the final sample. When searching for reports in American and Indian newspapers,
we used ‘TikTok’ and ‘Tik Tok’, both seen in English news coverage, in full-text searches.
In addition, we selected the retrieved articles in two ways. First, in terms of subjects, we focused
on news reports, excluding readers’ letters, book reviews, interviews and other subjects. Second, in
terms of content, we ensured that TikTok was the core theme of all articles in the final sample by
confirming that at least one-third of the entire article was devoted to TikTok-relevant issues.
Considering that the amount of news in China is limited, we included news from the newspaper, its
official website and the application version. Finally, we obtained 114 reports from China, 93 reports
from the United States and 156 reports from India.
In terms of specific methods, we tried to combine content and discourse analysis. As for content
analysis, we focused on describing the changes in the number and topics of news reports about
TikTok in the three countries over the past 3 years, aiming to provide a general overview of media
representation. In this process, we identified four main topics: technology, social issues, business
and politics. Based on these topics, we developed an exhaustive codebook. Two of the three authors
worked together to test its validity and then coded separately. Regarding the latter, we used
Fairclough’s (1992) approach of critical discourse analysis to examine media coverage related to
TikTok at the textual, discursive and social contextual levels.
Research findings
Among the sampled news articles, some overall trends emerged. We coded the primary issue area
of each news item into four categories: technology, society, business and politics.1 Generally, polit-
ical (54.55%) and commercial (27.82%) discourses represented the most open codes. As for spe-
cific countries, in China, 81.58% of the news articles were framed as political discourse, whereas
24.56% were about business issues. In the United States, the proportion of political and business
themes was relatively balanced, at 29.03% and 35.48%, respectively. Among the reports in the
selected Indian newspaper, 50% focused on politics, 25.64% on business and 35.9% on social
issues.2 Regarding the time distribution, the number of reports on TikTok increased dramatically in
2020. Before 2020, there were 130 news articles in total and the proportion of political and busi-
ness themes was 28.46% and 36.15%, respectively. After 2020, the number of news articles
increased to 233. Furthermore, political discourse dominated the news, increasing sharply to
61.9%, whereas business discourse decreased to 23.18%. In the following analysis, we use the
terms ‘de-politicised’ and ‘re-politicised’ mainly as generalisation of tendencies identified in the
news discourse. Specifically, we tried to find out whether media discourse depicted TikTok as a
political issue by connecting it with the Chinese state. Here, the state–enterprise relationship is a
key element in determining whether media discourse is politicised (Figure 1).
Therefore, in this article, we elaborate on the business and political codes. Regarding the busi-
ness codes, the close codes focus on market strategy, entry motivation, products and services, and
local relations. As to the political codes, the close codes focus on content regulation, data safety
and privacy, and global power struggle.
Miao et al. 7
In addition, most of the news coverage was event-driven. We sorted the events most often men-
tioned in the news reports as shown in Table 1, which provides a brief history of the development
of TikTok (Figure 2).
De-politicised discourse: an ambitious digital platform
Market strategy: to separate, not connect, the world. TikTok is often referred to as the international
version of Douyin. In spite of similar interfaces and functions, they are two different platforms. To
construct its international development strategy, ByteDance adopted the model of isolating ser-
vices for the Chinese market from those for the rest of the world, rather than universalising them.
This is considered one of its most distinctive characteristics compared with other Chinese Internet
companies (Chen, 2020). However, only the American news reports explicitly mentioned this,
whereas the reports from China and India rarely touched on this topic.
For example, the New York Times reported that two major Internets exist right now: China’s and
the rest of the world’s (Zhong, 2018). The strategy adopted by TikTok is isolation: it does not try
to unite the two Internet worlds through a set of unified models and logics. On the contrary, it
acknowledges and adapts to this reality, creating two similar but mutually separated systems serv-
ing the two cyberspaces. This isolation is reflected at various levels frequently mentioned in news
reports, such as management and human resources (hiring local employees and managers), content
creation (mainly local user-generated content), information flow restrictions (posts on Douyin and
TikTok are not interoperable) and data storage (building data centres outside of China). In one
news report, TikTok was even considered to deliberately avoid content about China so as to obscure
its Chinese roots, which may undermine its global expansion (DealBook, 2019).
Figure 1. Changes in issues and frames in the news in China, the United States and India before and after
2020.
8 Media International Australia 00(0)
However, the Chinese reports rarely mentioned this isolation strategy. Most of the reports used
the term Douyin guojiban (the international version of Douyin) to refer to TikTok. Even if some of
the reports mentioned that TikTok had taken measures, such as separating international and domes-
tic data and hiring overseas personnel, most interpreted them as necessary measures to better
understand and get a firm foothold in the local market. Only one article admitted that TikTok tried
to keep its distance from its Chinese headquarters to minimise distrust in the international market
(DeepTech, 2020).
Entry motivation: the attack of the giant from China. Some scholars have pointed out that the inter-
national development of Chinese media is often treated with scepticism, due to their close relation-
ship with the Chinese government (Sun, 2015). However, TikTok did not initially encounter such
doubts. Both in the United States and India, most reports before 2020 regarded it as an ambitious
start-up digital entertainment giant, whereas the Chinese media saw it as a source of national pride.
Before the atmosphere became more politicised, the Indian reports mainly focused on the
unstoppable development of TikTok in the Indian market. It was argued that as ‘the biggest market
for TikTok, outside China’ (timesofindia.com, 2020a), India played a pivotal role in ByteDance’s
international strategy. Similar to the Indian media before 2020, the American media also focused
on commercial perspectives, describing TikTok as ‘China’s King of Internet Fluff’ (Zhong, 2018)
Table 1. The timeline of TikTok’s development.
Date TikTok’s Development
July 2016 Douyin was officially launched in China.
Sep 2017 TikTok, the international version of Douyin was launched.
Nov 2017 Toutiao acquired Musical.ly for $1 billion. The merger was completed in August 2018, and
the new platform was upgraded with the TikTok name.
May 2018 TikTok topped the App Store in Thailand.
Jul 2018 TikTok topped on download in Vietnam.
Nov 2018 TikTok had more than 500 million users worldwide.
Feb 2019 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned musical.ly (i.e., TikTok) about illegally
collecting personal information of children, with a settlement of final reconciliation
payment of $5.7 million (38 million yuan) from TikTok.
Feb 2019 The total number of downloads exceeded 1 billion.
Apr 2019 The Chennai high court in India declared that TikTok ‘encourages pornography and is harmful
to children’. TikTok was banned for a week and come back online in India after negotiations.
Nov 2019 The US government announced it would launch a national security investigation of TikTok’s
parent company ByteDance’s acquisition of American social media app Musical.ly in 2017.
Dec 2019 A class action was filed in California, alleging that TikTok had transferred users’ personally
identifiable information to servers in China.
Dec 2019 The Pentagon issued a security warn urging 23,000 Pentagon employees to delete TikTok,
declaring it could lead to the leakage of personal information.
Jan 2020 The US Army and the US Navy issued a ban on TikTok on government phones, saying
that phones that did not uninstall the app would not be allowed to use the Navy’s internal
network.
Apr 2020 TikTok had more than 2 billion downloads worldwide.
Jun 2020 India banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok.
Jul 2020 After India’s ban, the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States was
considering restricting Chinese social apps such as TikTok.
Aug 2020 US President Donald Trump issued a ‘ban order’ against TikTok.
Miao et al. 9
trying to conquer the world. Nevertheless, the two countries’ responses also demonstrated some
differences. Whereas the Indian media held a vigilant attitude towards TikTok, arguing that it rep-
resented China’s national interests in international cyber-competition (timesofindia.com, 2020b),
the American news reports took a relatively positive view of TikTok’s technological creativity and
market performance. For example, the New York Times described TikTok as ‘a social network that
is genuinely fun to use’ (Roose, 2018) and ‘the first entertainment powerhouse born in and built for
the smartphone age’ (Ovide, 2020).
In contrast, the Chinese media reflected dual expectations for TikTok’s success in the interna-
tional market. Economically, China regarded the internationalisation of TikTok as a key strategy
for tapping the global market. In this ‘overseas gold rush’ discourse, India was often seen as a rich
source of TikTok users, whereas the United States was described as the most profitable sector of
the overseas market. In terms of political and cultural strategies, although TikTok tried to shy away
Figure 2. The timeline of TikTok’s development.
10 Media International Australia 00(0)
from the Chinese government, it was still regarded as a successful model for the Chinese Internet
industry and even the entire made-in-China branding strategy (Yin, 2019). It is worth noting that
this kind of nationalist discourse comes from the media, or quotes from government officials or
experts, not from TikTok or its parent company ByteDance. This shows that regardless of their own
wishes, it is difficult for Chinese Internet companies to completely disassociate themselves from
the grand narrative of nationalism (Channel, 2020).
Products and services: young people, the Internet celebrity economy and algorithms. Regarding reports
on the TikTok product itself, three main sub-codes were identified: users, usage and algorithms. All
of the sampled newspapers in the three countries emphasised that the primary users of TikTok are
young people. However, young users also present a series of challenges to the development of
TikTok. For example, in the United States, TikTok was accused of illegally collecting the private
information of users under the age of 13, which violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection
Act (Kang, 2019; Singer, 2020). In India, authorities briefly banned TikTok for allegedly promot-
ing child pornography and other illegal content (TOI-Online, 2019).
The use of TikTok by teenagers has also been given multiple meanings: a creative community
has formed around this application, due to the enthusiasm and motivation of young creators
(Chakraborty, 2020). Furthermore, for many, TikTok is ‘one of the most accepting platforms when
it comes to embracing different people’, where users of different backgrounds can gain opportuni-
ties to make their voices heard and express themselves regardless of what others think about them
(Zhong and Schultz, 2020). TikTok is also a place where people can ‘make viral fame, look for
career option[s]’ and become famous overnight (Chakraborty, 2020). In India and China, media
reports repeatedly recounted stories about users in poor areas becoming celebrities on TikTok, thus
changing their lives. TikTok is thus a ‘game-changer’ for many marginalised users, for whom
‘virality . . . translate[s] into money as much as fame’ (Banerjee, 2020b).
TikTok’s unique algorithm is generally considered to be the principal reason for its success. The
New York Times stated that the ‘algorithmic features of TikTok makes itself unique and rewrite the
landscape of social media’ and its ‘aesthetic and functional similarities to Vine or Snapchat or
Instagram belie a core difference: TikTok is more machine than man’ (Herrman, 2019). Compared
with most other social media platforms, TikTok is much less dependent on interpersonal relations.
Instead, it relies heavily on user behaviour, algorithms and artificial intelligence learning capabili-
ties to create an endless stream of short videos (Herrman, 2019). The Indian news reports also
claimed that TikTok’s algorithmic mechanism of recommendation is quite unusual, in that it usu-
ally allocates 200–300 active viewers for videos uploaded by new users. Through this mechanism,
newcomers are able to compete with established popular creators who already have tens of thou-
sands of fans. This feature is attractive to young Indians who are desperately eager to get fame
(Chakraborty, 2020).
Local relations: competing with enterprises and cooperating with the government. TikTok’s commercial
development in the international market inevitably involves interaction with relevant actors. The
sampled news reports present two major aspects of interaction: the competitive relationship with
local enterprises and the cooperative relationship with the government. In the Indian market, Tik-
Tok faces pressure from competitors, such as India’s own short video application Mitron. But as
pointed out by observers, Chinese Internet companies have taken a dominant position in the Indian
information and communications technology (CAICT) market (timesofindia.com, 2020). In the
Chinese media reports, TikTok was seen as an emerging force challenging traditional Internet
giants, with the internationalisation of TikTok described as ‘a showdown between the old overlord
and the new strong’ (InternationalForum, 2019). The American media reports on competition
Miao et al. 11
focused on disputes caused by ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly and Facebook’s competitive
strategies (Nicas, 2019). It also defined TikTok’s success as ‘the most direct incursion yet by a
Chinese company into Silicon Valley’s turf’ (Nicas, 2019). TikTok is thus regarded as ‘the first
ever Chinese consumer-tech company to break out big in the U.S.’ (Wells and Jie, 2019).
Different from their accounts of fierce market competition, the media reports from the three
countries had a relatively positive tone when discussing TikTok’s interactions with local govern-
ments. In the Chinese media reports, TikTok was described as actively adapting itself to the inter-
national market and establishing a positive relationship with foreign governments. Many of the US
reports emphasised that to minimise political distrust, TikTok has taken various measures to main-
tain, improve and promote relations with local government. For example, TikTok adjusts its pri-
vacy, security and content reviewing rules according to local laws (Zhong, 2018); recruits and
organises local management teams and leadership to ‘minimize reminders of its Chinese roots’
(DealBook, 2019); invites third-party public relations agencies to handle the relationship with the
government; and conducts independent investigations of public security concerns (Nicas et al.,
2019). The media reports from India also described TikTok’s measures to actively cooperate with
the government to better integrate into the local market. For example, in response to the govern-
ment’s accusation of ‘spreading vulgar content’, TikTok established a local security centre
(timesofindia.com, 2019) and published a transparency report (Hariharan, 2020).
Re-politicised discourse: ICT and geo-politics
Content regulation: reasonable regulation or censorship? Content regulation is a critical issue in the
TikTok controversy. According to the sampled reports from the American and Indian newspapers,
there have been two contradictory discourses. The governments of both countries have criticised
the presence of content inappropriate for children on TikTok, such as pornography, and demanded
the platform to tighten its content review (Hussain, 2020; Kang, 2019). The news reports also cov-
ered TikTok’s countermeasures, such as developing a ‘family safety mode’ and setting up ‘digital
well-being’ features, including screen time management, direct messages and restricted mode.
However, the United States and India have been worried that TikTok may follow the Chinese
government’s directives to censor or highlight certain content and thereby manipulate public opin-
ion. Some of the sampled news reports from American media mentioned TikTok’s censorship of
sensitive China-related content, such as posts about Xinjiang and Hong Kong (Lin and Xiao,
2020). The New York Times even warned that TikTok could become a public opinion platform for
China to influence American politics, in the same way that Russia interfered in the 2016 US elec-
tion (Yuan, 2019). The Indian media also claimed that in response to moderate criticism of China,
TikTok has adopted a ‘shadowban’ approach, setting the number of video views to zero and cutting
off links to other videos (Banerjee, 2020a). All of these news reports emphasised TikTok’s Chinese
background and its potential connection with the Chinese government, hinting at its untrustworthi-
ness. For example, a New York Times reporter asked, ‘How did a company that is further democra-
tizing self-expression come out of sternly undemocratic China in the first place?’ (Zhong, 2018).
In the face of these doubts, the response of the Chinese media has been selective. Regarding
inappropriate content on TikTok, the Chinese media reports quoted TikTok’s official response,
emphasising that it has been actively cooperating with official regulations and improving its meas-
ures against such content. However, they completely avoided the issue of possible Chinese govern-
ment interference. None of the sampled Chinese news reports touched on this issue or made any
attempt to clarify the relationship between the Chinese government and TikTok. On the contrary,
they reported on how TikTok cooperated with local government to carefully review uploaded
12 Media International Australia 00(0)
content and pointed out that the United States and India are the two countries that have issued the
most regulations and deletion orders to TikTok (jiemian.com, 2020).
In short, the focus of the sampled media reports is not whether content on TikTok should be
reviewed, but who decides what should be reviewed. In other words, the core concern is whose
interests the review ultimately serves. These discourses transform TikTok from a relatively neutral
commercial high-tech company into a political subject embedded in the positions and interests of
specific countries involved in a geo-political competition. From the American and Indian perspec-
tives, TikTok could be a digital Trojan horse through which the Chinese government can manipu-
late international public opinion. As the Indian newspaper pointed out, ‘TikTok is to serve China’s
global political and military purposes’ (Banerjee, 2020a).
Data safety and privacy: a technical or political issue? Both the American and Indian news reports not
only mentioned the rapid development of TikTok and the geometric growth in the number of users,
but also expressed concerns about personal information security and privacy protection. Some of
the reports briefly mentioned TikTok’s official responses and countermeasures, such as strictly
complying with local data security policies and setting up data management centres outside of
mainland China. However, overall these sampled reports imply that the measures taken by TikTok
have failed to eliminate doubts and concerns about its data security issues. The Indian media
reports cited a large number of accusations from different figures, ranging from officials to indus-
try opinion leaders, who believed that TikTok not only ‘shared information of Indian users with
any foreign government, including that of China’, but also ‘misappropriat[ed] user data’ (Singh,
2020). TikTok was labelled as ‘spyware’ (timesofindia.com, 2020b) and regarded as a threat to
India’s ‘data sovereignty’ (PTI, 2020). As China’s relations with the United States and India dete-
riorated, this argument was accordingly strengthened. For example, the Times of India clearly
stated that the ban on TikTok was instated under an emergency clause of the IT Act after a border
clash between Indian and Chinese soldiers (TNN, 2020). Some of the reports also framed the ban
as a blow to China’s Digital Silk Road project and described the Indian government’s action as a
form of military strategy, reflecting ‘a larger effort to thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)
strategy to mine data for both political and military purposes’ (Bagchi, 2020).
Although concerns about TikTok’s security issues have evolved from initial worries to crusades
and accusations, none of the newspapers provided clear evidence. Most of the criticism about
safety issues came from the American and Indian armies, governments, members of Congress,
nongovernmental organisations and business leaders who compete with TikTok. In contrast, the
only defence cited was from TikTok itself, whereas the positions of the Chinese government and
other sources were neglected. This method of reporting strengthened the perception that TikTok
has a close connection with the Chinese government and reflected long-entrenched ideas about
China in international journalism: China is a one-party authoritarian country, and TikTok comes
from China, so it must be forced to obey the government’s demands. Therefore, when Chinese
officials wish to collect information from other countries, TikTok will inevitably hand over the data
it collects from millions of users, posing a severe national security threat to the host country.
The Chinese media did not directly respond to the question of whether the Chinese government
requires TikTok to provide data, but adopted a discursive strategy of confrontational accusation.
For example, in response to India’s ban on Chinese applications, the media repeatedly quoted the
views of the spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in India, accusing India of taking ‘discrimina-
tory restrictions, reasons of which are vague and far-fetched, and procedures violate fair and open
procedures’ (Shan and Wang, 2020). In response to Trump’s allegations against TikTok, Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokesperson pointed out that ‘the speeches of some American officials are sheer
fabrication and malicious slanders’ (Cui, 2020). In response to the accusations from the United
Miao et al. 13
States and India, the Chinese media took a more politicised perspective, interpreting TikTok’s
experience in the United States and India as a manifestation of geo-political conflicts between
China and the other two countries. In one news report about India’s ban on Chinese social media,
the author concluded, ‘TikTok, like all other Chinese apps, is not facing a legal lawsuit, but a politi-
cal trial without any just procedures’ (Hu, 2020).
The game of global power struggles. With the escalation of China’s conflicts with India and the
United States in 2020, reports on TikTok have increasingly focused on international relations and
even the global power structure. The news reports from the three countries also reflect unequal
international relations. Those from India focused on the impact of Chinese Internet applications on
its domestic development and showed more resistance to Chinese companies, such as TikTok. For
example, the Indian news reports repeatedly emphasised that one of the primary purposes of the
international expansion of Chinese Internet companies, especially those involving civilian infra-
structures and emerging new technologies, such as AI, is to serve China’s political and military
ambitions, a strategy that embodies the CCP’s ‘military–civilian fusion’ policy (PTI, 2020).
The sampled American media reports also mentioned that the success of TikTok in the US mar-
ket forced ‘Americans for the first time to consider living in a world influenced by a Chinese-
backed social media network’ (Yuan, 2019) and noted that it represented ‘the first time that
Americans have had to consider that U.S. companies might not always rule the internet’ (Ovide,
2020). These reports imply that Chinese Internet companies are challenging the dominance of the
United States in global cyberspace. However, they did not frame the US government’s suppression
of TikTok as a result of competition for digital hegemony. Instead, these reports continued to use
the technology and security frame to justify the actions taken by the US government. That is, these
actions were not so-called political retaliation, but counter-actions aimed at TikTok’s technical
defects and its suspicious connection with the Chinese government.
In the Chinese media discourse, it was argued that India’s ban on TikTok was an act of retalia-
tion, but India was not regarded as a powerful competitor in the global cyberspace. The Chinese
media emphasised China’s massive share of the Indian ICT market and the benefits it brings to
India. From this perspective, India’s ban on TikTok will not be as harmful to China as its negative
impact on India. Other reports mentioned the domestic situation in India, arguing that the real pur-
pose of banning Chinese applications was to stir up nationalist sentiment and shift attention away
from domestic crises. Some of the news reports pointed out that India’s ban on Chinese applica-
tions ‘has something to do with Western agitation and provocation’ (Strategy, 2020). In contrast,
when the target was the United States, the basic view in the Chinese media was that TikTok has
challenged the American hegemony in global cyberspace and thus violated its vested interests.
Therefore, the American actions of investigating, reviewing and even threatening to ban Chinese
applications are regarded as a form of retaliation for being challenged by China in the digital
sphere (Zhang and Xin, 2020).
Conclusions and discussion
TikTok is China’s most successful and popular, but also most controversial, global social network
platform. In this article, we examine news discourse from major outlets in China, the United States
and India to understand how TikTok has been perceived and framed against the context of global
geo-politics. We have tried to go beyond the traditionally economically centred approach to analys-
ing China’s industrial internationalisation strategy by emphasising the importance of geo-politics
and international relations.
14 Media International Australia 00(0)
Specifically, we identify the two opposing strategies of de-politicisation and re-politicisation in
TikTok’s internationalisation process. In other words, we attempt to understand how the compa-
ny’s own de-politicised market strategy and relevant national stakeholders’ re-politicised strategy
put TikTok in its current predicament.
Our analysis shows that before 2020, both American and Indian media regarded TikTok as an
ambitious digital giant from China. A commercial competition frame obviously dominates the
discursive logic here. However, since the beginning of 2020, the frame has quickly shifted from
commercial competition to the infringement of citizens’ privacy and even to a national security
threat. As analysed above, this shift was realised through disputes in three main areas: content
regulation, data security and international power struggle. In this process, TikTok’s Chinese back-
ground and its relationship with the Chinese government became the focus of news coverage and
the nationalist frame calling for greater defence of national security took over.
In contrast, the Chinese media reports completely avoided mentioning the international com-
munity’s questioning of China’s political system and Internet policy, never trying to clarify or
respond to the accusations from the United States and India. Instead, they attempted to shift the
focus of the problem by contextualising the case of TikTok as one of China’s economic, political
and military confrontations with the United States and India, depicting the latter as trying to con-
tain China as a peaceful rising power. Similar to media discourses in India and the United States,
the Chinese media also emphasised that the TikTok dispute was not commercial but political in
nature. Nevertheless, the two sides have different definitions of the term ‘political’. In contrast to
the Indian and American media, which politicised the issue by focusing on the nature of the Chinese
state and government, the Chinese media argued that India and the United States were engaging in
retaliation against Chinese companies, including TikTok, because their vested interests had been
challenged by China. It can be seen that in the case of TikTok, the Chinese media and their coun-
terparts in India and the United States have not developed effective dialogic interactions. On the
contrary, given their different social contexts and target audiences, they have followed different
discursive strategies to re-politicise TikTok.
As the Internet industry has expanded, slogans such as ‘free flow of information’, ‘network
without borders’ and ‘connecting the entire world’ have dominated mainstream liberal discourse.
The logic here assumes that technology is neutral and romanticises globalisation. However, the
case of TikTok demonstrates that geo-political tensions and national boundaries have profound
impacts on the development of the global Internet, especially when international confrontations
occur. The global proliferation of ICT-facilitated applications and services from emerging powers,
such as China, will inevitably lead to conflicts with existing global or regional powers whose cur-
rent dominance in cyberspace is shaken. The controversy surrounding TikTok continues to grow,
and China, as an emerging cyber superpower, will definitely not stop its international exploration
just because of individual companies’ setbacks in the international market. These developments
will lead to increased pressures to reconstruct the global power structure. The long-term impact of
the international development of the Chinese Internet industry is therefore a topic worthy of con-
tinued attention and analysis, especially from the lens of political economy communication, digital
geopolitics and global Internet governance.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article: This study was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China ( 20BXW037,
19ZDA331, 21@ZH021), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. CUC210B002),
and the Ph.D. Research Foundation Project of Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication “Digital Media
and Everyday Life” (No.27170120003/016).
Miao et al. 15
ORCID iD
Weishan Miao https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8071-8666
Notes
1. The technology category includes algorithms, systems and technological security; the social category
includes privacy, crime, fake news, cyber celebrities, entertainment and pornography; the business cat-
egory includes marketing, user numbers, business partnerships, transnational development, products and
services; the political category includes international conflicts, national security, global power order
and governance, content censorship and control, and political mobilisation/regulation/embargo. Two of
the authors first coded 60 (16.5%) of the total 363 sampled news reports independently, with an inter-
reliability coefficient of 0.92. The two coders then coded the remaining reports with an even division of
labour.
2. The percentages add up to over 100% because one report may cover two or more issues and thus may be
coded into more than one category.
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