The US–China Tech War Heats Up: TikTok, Semiconductors, and SlanderBots

An employee makes a chip at a factory in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China, on March 17, 2021. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary The U.S.–China tech war is complicated and heating up.

First, Washington is continuing to apply pressure on Beijing where it counts—by blocking its access to the most advanced global semiconductor technologies. Beijing is responding by trying to control rare minerals used in tech processes. The minerals and semiconductors that each attempts to deny the other are critical for military production.

If China can manage to take over Taiwan without its semiconductor factories getting destroyed in the process (a tall order, given reports that they can be remotely disabled by the United States and the Netherlands), Beijing could reap a tech bonanza.

In an Oct. 10 report, Washington complained about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to get a stranglehold on cobalt used in electric vehicles, drones, ordnance, and fighter jets. A Wall Street Journal report cited a State Department official who said Beijing’s “predatory conduct is not only hurting the [cobalt mining] competition” but also risking the U.S. energy transition. One Chinese company has a 38 percent share of the global cobalt mine supply from its operations in a single country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. China, as a whole, has a 79 percent share of refined cobalt.

Both countries are trying to control international cloud computing and undersea internet cables while bypassing each other’s networks. Analysts assume that both Beijing and Washington spy on whatever international internet traffic they can access and, in the case of Beijing, the domestic traffic as well. The regime uses its unfettered cyber espionage for not only traditional purposes but also industrial secrets that could be shared with multiple Chinese firms at a time. The country’s technical sophistication on a wide range of products, up to and including U.S. spacecraft and aircraft carriers, now seems to be just a few steps behind the biggest democratic countries at any given time.

In addition to hardware competition, the tech war bleeds into software and content. The CCP is now using what could be called “slanderbots” on social media platform X to influence U.S. politics. Beijing is promoting anti-Semitic content that targets both Israel and U.S. politicians who are tough on China. And the CCP, of course, has the gall to do so while X is banned in China. With the rise of salacious content on TikTok, which is also banned in China, U.S. students are reading fewer books and doing worse in math.

Fourteen state attorneys general from both major parties are suing TikTok for putting America’s youth at risk through dangerous “challenges” and other content harmful to their mental health. This will require a partly duplicative legal defense by TikTok’s lawyers, who will have to argue similar cases in front of 14 different juries in 14 different states. The cases will produce a prodigious amount of evidence via 14 different discovery motions. The material unearthed in those cases will likely assist any future federal case.

Meanwhile, federal legislation requires TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok by April 2025, or the app will be banned. The state cases will likely decrease the company’s monetary value. All in all, the various measures against TikTok appear to be a strategy of “death by a thousand cuts.”

Key members of the Biden administration are deeply involved in the more general tech war against the CCP.

The office of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo stated on Oct. 8 that she told her Chinese counterpart that U.S. high-tech trade rules regarding China are “non-negotiable,” given the national security threat that the regime poses.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan is building on work during the Trump administration to improve U.S. tech competitiveness with respect to China. For example, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Clean Network involved tech company partners from around the world who pledged to rid their networks of components produced by Huawei.

Sullivan is coordinating with Japan and the Netherlands on targeted export controls that prevent the export of the most advanced semiconductor designs and production processes to China. He also wants to maintain other less strategic forms of trade with China and uses the metaphor of a “small yard and high fence” to describe the strategy. (It should be admitted that any trade with China that enriches the country increases the tax revenue that the CCP can and is using to build up its military.)

The United States, Japan, and the Netherlands are particularly important to his approach, as they all produce critical semiconductor designs and manufacturing equipment that cannot be obtained elsewhere. When united, these three countries have a near-monopoly on the most advanced semiconductors.

In a Wired Magazine report published on Oct. 10, Sullivan said the U.S.–China tech competition is personal to him:

“If technology is being used more for ill than for good, if the rules of the road are being set by authoritarian competitors, if the technologies of the future are invented elsewhere and not here, that’s going to mean less security, less jobs, and less productivity in the United States. I don’t want to see that world.”

He was recently involved in negotiations between Microsoft and a United Arab Emirates company that could empower China’s AI and genomics capabilities. The company, G42, was allegedly linked to China through two controversial companies: Huawei and BGI Genomics. He insisted that G42 cut its ties to China before greenlighting a $1.5 billion investment, reported Wired. G42 agreed but still has as its CEO Peng Xiao, who, according to the House Select Committee on the CCP, “operates and is affiliated with an expansive network of UAE and [China]-based companies that develop dual-use technologies and materially support PRC military-civil fusion and human rights abuses.”

Another challenge is how U.S. scientific and industrial innovation quickly falls into the hands of the CCP through not only cyber espionage but also the many Chinese nationals who study and research in the United States and allied universities and laboratories. Federally funded research at universities has advanced Chinese technologies that have military applications. Yet the United States wants to attract China’s best and brightest scientists to become loyal U.S. citizens. Washington seems to be at a loss as to how to rectify or quantify the leakage that is seemingly inherent to the process.

As should be clear by now, the tech war is difficult, and by no means is it certain it will be won. Beijing is rapidly adapting to U.S. tech controls by stockpiling materials and equipment and developing its own science and technology innovation ecosystem. As the United States and its allies increase tech controls on China, Beijing is fighting back with its own controls, shifting supply chains to authoritarian partners like Russia, Iran, and Arab countries and attempting to influence the political process in democracies, even as we soften our approach.

To win the tech war, we will have to do the opposite: act with greater alacrity and purpose than we have up until now. War of any kind, including the tech war, is not for the timid. Our policymakers must get tougher.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.