Since launching in 2016, the video-sharing app TikTok has become one of the world’s most popular social-media platforms. Owned by the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, TikTok surpassed one-billion active global users in 2021. But as those users post and watch short videos, behind the scenes TikTok is meticulously collecting data on them, tracking their preferences and online activities. The rapid global expansion of Chinese tech firms such as ByteDance has created a regulatory conundrum for countries worldwide. From Australia and Japan to India and Pakistan to the United States, governments have been grappling with the expanding scope of China’s digital regulations, which have set the stage for Beijing’s global collection of data. As data traverses borders without explicit consent, the privacy of individuals, organizations, and even government bodies is at risk, posing a potential threat to national security.
Recent reports have raised concerns that Chinese tech firms can track the location of specific citizens, that these firms are not transparent about who has access to their data (including, for example, Chinese government agencies), and that the influence of foreign governments over digital communications platforms like TikTok, where 30 percent of people under the age of thirty get their news, can influence everything from perceptions about international events to domestic elections. TikTok has denied these allegations, but it hasn’t disproved them. For example, TikTok claims not to have the capability to track users’ locations, yet its terms of service requires users to consent to exactly that.
Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Beijing has been broadening its definition of national security and enacting far-reaching data regulations, thereby establishing a basis in Chinese law for accessing incredible amounts of data about people all over the world. In 2019, under Beijing’s direction, the Hong Kong government proposed a bill that would have allowed a Hong congers to be extradited and tried in China, sparking massive protests. In response, Beijing cracked down harder. The 2020 Hong congers National Security Law set the stage for Beijing’s efforts to criminalize national-security violations (including those related to user data) and to hold all parties liable for criminal and civil transgressions—even those occurring outside China.
The extraterritorial framing of national-security oversight allows Beijing to access data gathered by tech platforms anywhere. The CCP regime is shaping global data regulations, both by establishing national standards that govern Chinese firms operating abroad and through its influence in multilateral standard-setting bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization. China’s 2021 Data Security Law allows the government to conduct “national security audits” of corporations’ data, giving Beijing access to any corporate data generated in China or by Chinese firms operating abroad. Beijing is making the rules in a way that will allow it to use tech platforms (including social-media and e-commerce platforms) to gather global data—a practice I call “data trafficking,” the erosion of sovereignty through the digital trade of goods and services—for purposes of “national security,” a term which the Chinese government has chosen to keep vague in data-protection laws. Indeed, in China today, “national security” includes nearly everything.
Beijing’s Digital Inroads
China’s Digital Silk Road (the tech side of the Belt and Road Initiative), paired with the global expansion of Chinese tech firms, allows the CCP regime to access the data of people everywhere. The Digital Silk Road and other transnational efforts drive tech investment in countries not just with weak tech infrastructure, but also with weak governance models. As Matthew Erie and Thomas Strand wrote in 2021, a “push-pull” dynamic—a combination of China’s push for data sovereignty and the demand for Chinese investment—shapes Beijing’s ability to govern digital platforms abroad: China finances or builds digital infrastructure in emerging markets and Chinese firms provide technology services, while the Chinese state retains control over user data through extraterritorial regulations that China imposes on those countries.
As Beijing continues to cast an ever-wider net for collecting user data, it benefits from Chinese-owned apps that are transnational in scope and scale, such as ByteDance’s TikTok, Tencent’s WeChat, and Alibaba’s, Ali Pay, Beijing has intentionally promoted the growth of China’s tech sector through state-led investment plans. The Chinese government has prioritized becoming self-sufficient in the tech sector, as well as enhancing its influence globally, through policy frameworks such as Xi’s “community of common destiny” and the “Global Security Initiative.” As a result, Chinese data-gathering tools and data-oversight practices are becoming the de facto international tools and practices.
Domestically, the Chinese government relies heavily on digital tools for governance, service delivery, and internal security, and its regulations offer a global model for Chinese-led governance of civic data. Often described collectively as the “social-credit system,” this governance model comprises a network of financial tools, smart-city management practices, and citizen-surveillance apps. For example, Beijing pioneered the so-called health codes, Jiankangma essentially QR codes linked to citizen data and managed via WeChat—to respond to the pandemic. The Jiankangma were created to track health and population movement, but have served as a foundation for tracking Chinese citizens. In my book Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty, I call the information gathered from such efforts China’s “national data corpus.” This body of user data enhances the government’s population-tracking initiatives and the development of new artificial intelligence (AI)–driven municipal-management tools, while also creating a “national body” grounded in data.
Although China developed the Jiankangma as a tool to limit covid exposures and thus enable the economy to keep running, that same tool now also functions as a means of social control—one that Beijing can sell to other governments. It has already exported surveillance infrastructure to countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere.
Large transnational datasets are also essential for developing commercial AI-driven platforms and other key technologies. Digital platforms such as TikTok and WeChat play an essential role in helping Beijing enhance its control over data governed outside China. Yet numerous and diverse commercial technologies rely on the very same user-surveillance and data-analytics tools that TikTok and WeChat use. The difference isn’t how China-based companies acquire data, but what they do with it. Firms whose parent companies are based in China or that have large business units that depend on being able to operate inside China enjoy far less autonomy with respect to how they respond to government data requests and oversight, and that will not change.
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