Chinese officials decried the lack of “fairness” in the US last week following the swift passage of a House bill that called for Chinese company ByteDance to divest its popular social media app TikTok. A foreign ministry spokesperson for China accused the US of using national security as a guise to “willfully suppress other countries’
Investors in TikTok’s Chinese parent company stand to benefit if it sold the app because divestment would remove a source of uncertainty, a Republican lawmaker said. “It would be in the financial interest of ByteDance’s investors to effectuate a forced sale,” congressman Mike Gallagher, who spearheaded a House-passed bill aimed at making the company divest
China’s internet giants from Alibaba Group Holding to Tencent Holdings slashed external investments last year amid an economic slowdown, regulatory headwinds and geopolitical tensions, according to data compiled by a Chinese consultancy. Total investment deals made by Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu plunged by nearly 40 per cent to 102 in 2023, with Tencent – known