Illustration: Tang Tengfei/Global Times

US Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Tuesday renewed calls to block short-form video sharing app TikTok in the US, after some media reports said China took an ownership stake in a subsidiary of ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok, Reuters reported.

Rubio claimed that "The Biden administration can no longer pretend that TikTok is not beholden to the Chinese Communist Party ... Even before today, it was clear that TikTok represented a serious threat to personal privacy and US national security."

At a time when the relationship between China and the US is already complicated, some US politicians have never tired of seizing any irrational excuse to hype up the delusional of non-existent national security risks, with their ulterior motive being to heighten tensions and bolster their own political brand. Rubio is one of those politicians and his latest call reflects nothing but his "China threat" paranoia, which, as usual, always neglected facts and confuses right and wrong.

Ever since being drawn into the privacy data security maelstrom amid China-US tensions, TikTok has sought to demonstrate its app is not a national security risk in the US by clarifying that its data centers are located outside of China and the company is not influenced by the Chinese government.

ByteDance is a Chinese internet giant with a large number of subsidiaries and shareholders. For this kind of large-scale companies, it is normal for some of their subsidiaries to have minority ownership by state-owned companies in some cases. And if this could be an excuse for crackdown from a foreign government, then on this basis many Fortune 500 companies will not be able to operate overseas.

In fact, the Biden administration's June decision to revoke Trump-era bans on TikTok and WeChat may, to a certain extent, answer the question as to whether or not TikTok poses a national security risk in the US.

Nitpicking without evidence is not the right approach to show some politicians really care about the national security. If anything, they are actually showing that they won't miss any opportunity to crackdown on Chinese products popular with Americans simply as a way to garner more public attention. TikTok's growth has been remarkable, with the app being the most downloaded and highest grossing non-game during the first half of this year, according to Sensor Tower.

If Rubio and other anti-China politicians are really so resistant to Chinese products including apps due to concerns over the "China threat," they might as well set themselves as an example to American voters by getting rid of anything made in China in their daily life. 

What these politicians say and do reminded me of a joke circulating on the internet a few years ago. An American senator called his wife before leaving the office and asked her to put away everything made in China. He said he was bringing two colleagues home for dinner, and his home should not give them the impression that he was unpatriotic or against Trump's trade sanctions against China. When the senator returned home with his colleagues, the front door was gone, the windows were gone, when they entered the house, all the furniture, carpets, and decorations were gone. The whole house was empty.

The author is a reporter with the Global Times. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cn