One has to question that with Chinese companies they now have to make greater accountancy of their investments, makes smarter investments. Tencent recently bought a part of Japanese games developer Platinum Games, well known for their Bayonetta and Nier Automata series. They also threw money on Reddit. What for? Why not make better investments within China? What the heck Tencent is doing throwing money on the Top Gun 2 movie?
I think that this is part of a broader corporate strategy to enhance China's image internationally and hopefully get some domestic political currency in return. A lot of the goodwill towards USA is basically derived from being the protagonist in popular culture. Games and movies are make easy anti-China targets. Top Gun is a perfect example, the original was basically a "Red Scare", anti-USSR movie. Today, Hollywood would never antagonize China if they want to make a blockbuster. I think the investments just further this. Since Hollywood is going through huge consolidation (Disney-Fox, CBS-Viacom again, etc), if you can't get the money from the big boys, then who else has big bucks?
There are a lot of ridiculous things in this world that feels like blatant overreach, for example, EU looking to disband or dismember Google on its own.
In the future, you don't know how long this Tiktok fad will last. The tech industry teaches us that things are highly transcendental, like what happened to AOL, Yahoo and MySpace. Better to sell part of Tiktok while its red hot. You can probably get tens of billions easy. When the fad fades --- jeez, Tiktok is popular with teenagers, how fleeting is that market --- those US investors would be the ones holding the losses.
In theory, sometimes you need government overreach. Google and a lot of these companies are becoming too large and too powerful. The US healthcare system is a perfect example of not enough government intervention. Port of LA makes sense too, government feels it is a matter of national security. However, this is not one of those cases. As you mention, TikTok is a fad, it's something pretty stupid IMO, but to threaten such drastic measures at even a hint of popularity is totally transparent political maneuvering.
Now that some of the Chinese companies are getting too big and successful, the U.S. is coming up with other underhanded strategies like arresting the daughter of the founder of the company that is getting too successful, banning companies under the guise of national security, and making up stories of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer, of which if there's such a thing, why has Apple and now Tesla (following other U.S. auto companies) still continued to set up company in China?
To add to this point. I think the whole intellectual property theft accusation is one of the biggest red herrings. It is basically tailor made for media consumption. The idea that all Chinese people can't come up with a single original idea and just copy, copy, copy. IMO, the weak intellectual property protection is probably pressuring domestic brands the most. I've read stories of Chinese tourists buying rice in Japan (but actually grown in China) because they believe that the export goods are the best (and is true to an extent). There was a joke back in the day that the best place to buy Moutai was LAX (very unlikely to be fake). Western media likes to talk about knock off Gucci bags or whatever, but really it's common things like "Laoganma" hot sauce and "Yeshu (Coconut Palm)" Coconut milk that are constantly fighting off imitation products domestically.
Chinese companies don't have to invest on the US while US companies invest in China. So what happens is the money flows from the US to China instead. The big loser is driving away Chinese companies is the US. Chinese companies are not going to add jobs in the US, and by lessening investment, they add less still while the US companies create jobs in China. That's why Xi is smarter than Trump.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. This is the silliest part of this "trade war". The reality is that Trump should be encouraging Chinese to invest in America to balance the trade. CRRC opened their MA train car operation and they hit them with tariffs on the parts imported from China!
