After being banned from India and talks that it would be banned in the US, TikTok said it would be exiting the Hong Kong market.
A TIkTok spokesman told Reuters that it would quit the Hong Kong market within days. The news comes at a time when Facebook and other tech companies have suspended processing government requests for user data in the region.
Hong Kong is a loss-making market but shows how TikTok and other Chinese-based companies are under-fire across the globe. In the past, Kevin Mayer, the company CEO has claimed that app’s user data is not stored in China, a claim which has been contested.
TikTok has previously claimed it doesn’t comply with China to censor the government but Indian Tiktokers like Saloni Gaur have contested that claim.
How world is uniting against China’s bullying?
Chinese President Xi Jinping has apparently decided that this is the right time to assert dominance and territorial expansionism when the global economies are reeling with the side-effects of a deadly pandemic outbreak, but instead of just rolling over, a growing number of nations are fighting back, the New York Post reported.
New Delhi raising of tariffs on Chinese goods, restricting Chinese investments and banning TikTok as well as 58 other Chinese apps from Indian phones is one of the latest in the bid to demonstrate that India, for one, is clearly not intimidated by China's growing hawk policies.
Not only this, but many Indians are also now boycotting "Made in China" products, a task made easier because online retailers like Amazon have been ordered by New Delhi to tell buyers where products are made.
The respective developments from the Indian side came in response to China's unprovoked attack against Indian border personnel at Galwan Valley in Eastern Ladakh on June 15, as a result of which the world's largest democracy had moved some 30,000 troops to the Himalayan border to counter any further provocative actions by the Communist Party regime, according to the New York Post.
Meanwhile, the people of the Philippines are up in arms over China's expansionism into areas of the South China Sea claimed by Manilla after a Philippine fishing boat sunk in its own territorial waters by increasingly predatory Chinese ships.
When anti-US President Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016, he initially ignored popular sentiment and announced a "pivot to Beijing" on the promise of USD 24 billion in Chinese investments.
Four years later, all that has changed. With the Chinese Navy sailing ever closer to Philippine shores and few Chinese projects in progress, Duterte has reversed his earlier decision to terminate his country's Visiting Forces Agreement with the US. Given a choice between having American or Chinese naval vessels anchored in Subic Bay, the decision was pretty obvious.
In addition to this, the world has been a witness to how the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong were beaten by the city's riot police on Beijing's orders after the Asian giant passed the national security law, further restricting the privileged freedom of the semi-autonomous region, the New York Post reported.
The sight of the 7.3 million free people of Hong Kong being crushed under the heel of the Chinese Communist Party regime is one the world will not easily forget. It has already prompted UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to offer British citizenship to three million Hong Kongers, not to mention take a tougher line toward China itself. Huawei, for example, can kiss its 5G business in the UK goodbye.
Now the interesting twist in the tale comes after knowing that China has also taken a toll on Australia, an island continent in the far south and also a part of the Asia Pacific.
Australia's farmers and miners are hit with trade sanctions after Canberra which suggests that the virus, which came out of China, may have come from there.
Also, to counter the recent surge in cyberattacks, Canberra has promised to recruit at least 500 cyberwarriors, bolstering the country's online defences. Meanwhile, an astonishing 94 per cent of Australians say they want to begin decoupling their economy from China's.
The same story is being repeated around the globe. From Sweden to Japan to Czechia, more and more nations are coming to understand China's mortal threat to the postwar democratic and capitalist world order.
"Xi Jinping and the Communist Party that he leads have so badly overplayed their hand that they have, in a mere six months, accomplished what Donald Trump could not in almost four years: They have unified the world against China. And communist leader Xi has only himself to blame for the brazen move," the report said.
On Wednesday, the US Congress unanimously voted to sanction China for its new security law that would effectively nullify Hong Kong's legal system and put Beijing in charge.
