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Editor’s note: Tom Fowdy is a British international relations and political analyst and graduated from Durham and Oxford Universities. He writes on topics related to China, the DPRK, Britain, and the United States. The article reflects the views of the author and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
Ant Financial is the Alibaba-linked payments company that runs the popular Alipay app. Alipay has helped engineer a “cashless revolution” in China that has made transactions easy, fast and convenient.
The result is that its parent company has grown to become one of the largest financial organizations in the world, the value of the company is estimated at more than $ 200 billion, larger than Goldman Sachs. Ant will soon go through an initial public offering (IPO) on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges; It is expected to be the largest IPO in history and raise approximately $ 30 billion. Many Wall Street companies in the US are rushing to join it.
But not everyone is happy. We live in a time when anything in China that succeeds on a global scale is subject to a wave of hysteria, fearful and vindictive policies in the United States. After turning McCarthyite politics into a weapon to attack Huawei, TikTok and others, Ant Financial’s immense achievement has attracted the spleen of Washington’s best.
First, an anonymous report appeared in the US media claiming that the White House can sanction Ant for disrupting his IPO. The report was speculative and unconfirmed policy, but the person who leaked it had an agenda. Second, US Senator from Florida Marco Rubio, a prominent China hawk, demanded that the White House find a way to delay the offer.
What is the rationale behind why the United States should act against you? Not surprisingly, it’s the same old rhetoric that the company, without the evidence offered as usual, somehow poses a threat to America’s national security.
The mainstream media in the West were once again glad to convey these narratives at face value. Reuters reports on Rubio’s comments stated that there were “fears” and “concerns” that Ant would “steal financial data from Americans” and of course they represented these comments as legitimate, pointing to the obvious political opportunism behind them. .
Once again, as always, the term “national security threat” is abused to point to anything in China that the United States now considers too successful.
In this photo illustration, a logo for TikTok’s Chinese video-sharing social networking service viewed on a smartphone with the flags of the United States and China in the background. / Getty
In this photo illustration, a logo for TikTok’s Chinese video-sharing social networking service viewed on a smartphone with the flags of the United States and China in the background. / Getty
Such a policy and outlook toward China is not being derived from logic, reason or strategy, but from spite, pettiness and childish behavior. Rather than deriving a calculated and balanced strategy for Beijing, America’s broader doctrine is simply to attack anything that makes America’s own achievements or role in the world “feel small” and attempt to hammer them in to preserve the capabilities of the United States. This attitude has the flavor of Trump’s personal perspective, in which he openly seeks to position himself as bigger, better, and more successful than others, with the active goal of treating rivals with contempt and acting like a bully.
The entire saga on TikTok, ended for now in part due to COVID-19 mayhem at the White House, is a textbook case study of this immature approach to politics. American politicians sought to target, demonize and even ban the app on the premise that it was Chinese and that it was successful on a global scale, even though, as a video app, it had no strategic importance.
The national security line was just a convenient front for this “politics of envy,” as it has been for everything. The president wanted to blackmail ByteDance with the application by force as an electoral stunt to humiliate China, not because it was a serious threat.
In this sense, regardless of what happens, we should not take this rhetoric about Ant Financial seriously. The company has done nothing wrong and the allegations it has are so baseless that they shouldn’t even be discussed.
The only problem is that it is a Chinese company and that it is successful on a global scale. Nothing more and nothing less. The White House just wants to rain on its parade and spoil its IPO on the premise of spitting on China’s success. If they are naive to take serious action, the consequences of any move will hurt world financial markets and likely undermine the world position of the US dollar.
It’s not a smart move, and quite explicitly the new “obsession” and “worries” about the company are the product of childish envy directed at China and a playground policy of spiteful returns. Ultimately, American politicians must learn to accept China as a global player and live with it, rather than erratically destabilizing the world in an effort to topple it.
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