China is now engaged in open hybrid warfare against the West

Conflict rages in Gaza and Ukraine, and tensions heighten over Taiwan. In Beijing, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just held difficult talks with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi. Despite Xi Jinping’s statement at a joint press conference that the US and China should “seek common ground … rather than engage in vicious competition”, efforts at detente seem to have been fruitless.

Yet in the midst of a worsening geostrategic crisis, President Biden last week signed a bill into law threatening a ban on TikTok, a social media app enjoyed by millions of young people worldwide. What does this curious nexus of events tell us?

In essence, the inane appeal of TikTok is at the heart of the matter. Social media activity has gripped a new global generation, and there are few limits to the access such platforms have to data owned by their users.

Since TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, is Chinese, it is obliged by law to serve the Chinese state. There have been allegations in turn that information collected by TikTok is exploited by the Chinese state, which is why Western governments including the UK and US have forbidden its use on government devices. There is also considerable suspicion that the algorithms used on the platform are used to present users with politically useful narratives. 

If ByteDance refuses to sell the platform, and instead allows it to be banned or closed down, many will take this as an indication that Beijing would value control of sensitive algorithms more than the prosperity of the company that uses them. All indications are that China would block any sale.

The issue, however, is larger than one app. The Chinese Communist Party has weaponised every aspect of its interactions with the outside world with the aim of undermining, defeating and supplanting the West as the arbiter of global norms. After years of blind denial or compromised silence, in the past couple of weeks there has been a remarkable surge of Western media attention on how far and fast this process is progressing.

A few instances stand out. In Beijing this week, Mr Blinken said that the US and China needed to be clear what their differences are, “to avoid…