TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on online child safety on Capitol Hill, on January 31, 2024 in Washington. Photo: VCG

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was again grilled on unrelated issues such as nationality and ties to the Communist Party of China (CPC) at a US Congressional hearing on child safety on Wednesday (US time). It is a case of "yesterday once more" as Chew was interrogated for about five hours on unrelated questions at another US hearing in March 2023. 

Analysts said that the repeated US acts showed the US oppression of companies with a Chinese background. US politicians' unprofessional questions are seen as a "xenophobic witch hunt." What TikTok is experiencing is a "perfect storm of technology meeting geopolitical competition," they noted.

According to US media reports, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on child safety, and heard testimony by the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok and Discord. 

However, Chew was repeatedly asked if he had been a member of or was affiliated with the CPC. Chew replied every time that he is Singaporean.

Videos of Chew being interrogated soon trended on social media platforms, with netizens denouncing US lawmakers as "xenophobic" and "blatantly racist," especially when Chew had a similar experience in 2023.

At the March hearing in 2023, bipartisan lawmakers lined up to throw vague, speculative questions at Chew about data privacy, content moderation, child safety and potential ties to the CPC, but barely gave him a chance to respond. 

"This fully shows that some politicians in the US become jittery at the mention of anything that is China-related, while generalizing and abusing the concept of national security, and politicizing all issues," Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Science, told the Global Times on Thursday.

For the US, the "original sin" of TikTok is that its parent company ByteDance is a Chinese entity. TikTok has outperformed many of its American peers commercially, Zhang Xiaorong, director of the Beijing-based Cutting-Edge Technology Research Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday.

According to data provider Demandsage, TikTok has 1.1 billion active users across 160 countries and regions, with 150 million users in the US, making it the fifth most popular social media app in the world.

There are 41.4 million Gen Z TikTok users in the US as compared with 37.3 million Instagram users. Snapchat is the most used social media app by Gen Z in the US. It is estimated that in 2023, TikTok surpassed Snapchat too, according to Demandsage.

Meanwhile, Chew said TikTok will spend more than $2 billion this year on trust and safety globally, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing prepared testimony.

According to Bloomberg, the disclosure underscores the ByteDance unit's rapid growth in the US, and its ability to draw both people and advertising dollars away from rivals Facebook, Instagram and Google. Its users in the US are up sharply from more than 150 million last year.

"The US is exhibiting an escalating level of competitiveness, concurrently accompanied by a growing lack of commercial confidence. Consequently, the US tends to view competitors of 'pure native' US companies through a biased lens and give Chinese companies a hard time," said Zhang.

Wang said that the US government is sending a bad signal to foreign companies operating in the US, as well as to companies around the world, that there may be restrictions on investing in the country.

"Although the US has been touting itself as a rules-based market economy, it doesn't have any objective rules. All rules are chosen to serve the interests of the US political elite and US hegemony," Wang noted.