Republicans Demand Answers on TikTok’s Relationship with the CCP

T wo senior Republicans in the House of Representatives demanded answers from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a letter late last week, after Chew had dodged previous questions about TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.

The letter comes in the aftermath of a bombshell BuzzFeed News exposé released on June 17, which revealed that engineers from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, had accessed information on the app’s U.S. users from within China.

In the letter, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers and James Comer, the top GOP members on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Oversight Committee, respectively, described their concerns about how the popular app could be used by the Chinese government’s espionage apparatus — and they followed up on an important question that Chew had ignored.

“In 2017, the CCP passed the National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China. This law requires individuals, organizations, and institutions to assist CCP Public Security and State Security officials in carrying out and executing ‘intelligence’ work,” McMorris Rodgers and Comer wrote. “Specifically, it requires those covered by the law to ‘support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.’”

They added that the personal information produced by U.S. users of TikTok — which requires its users to consent to the collection of data including location, search history, faceprints, and voiceprints — “would be a massive national security risk in the hands of CCP intelligence.”

After BuzzFeed’s report broke last month, a group of senators led by Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee sent their own letter demanding answers of Chew. In his response, while Chew admitted that China-based ByteDance employees had accessed U.S. users’ data, he claimed that they could only do so in accordance with a “robust” security process set by stateside TikTok employees. He also dodged a simple, key question: “If the Chinese Communist Party asked you for U.S. user data, what is to stop you from providing it? Can the CCP compel you to provide this data, regardless of response? Can they access it, regardless of response?”

“We have not been asked for such data from the CCP. We have not provided U.S. user data to the CCP, nor would we if asked,” Chew wrote.

In their own letter, Comer and McMorris Rodgers noted that Chew’s response to Blackburn “did not address several key questions and, in fact, raises others.” They also asked if TikTok and ByteDance have determined that China’s intelligence law does not apply to their data.

The question is critical because ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, has a well-documented history of cooperation with the Chinese security state and the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Its corporate fortunes are dependent on the CCP’s willingness to let it flourish, which makes it unlikely that it would ever decline a demand for user data from Beijing.

In addition to following up on the questions Chew sidestepped from the previous letter, McMorris Rodgers and Comer also requested documents outlining the relationship between TikTok and Douyin, the TikTok-like app that ByteDance operates for Chinese users. The Chinese government owns a stake in Douyin, and U.S. lawmakers have previously warned that official TikTok policy permits the sharing of American users’ data with corporate affiliates such as Douyin.

In addition, McMorris Rodgers and Comer requested specific information on which Chinese ByteDance employees can access U.S. TikTok users’ data, internal corporate documents regarding the Trump administration’s thwarted efforts to ban the TikTok app in 2020, and a definitive answer to the question of whether ByteDance owns any of TikTok’s U.S. offices.

As the ranking members of their respective committees, McMorris Rodgers and Comer are each seen as the members most likely to chair those panels if Republicans win a House majority in November. So their efforts to get to the bottom of TikTok’s dealings with the Chinese Communist Party could potentially set the stage for wider-reaching GOP-led probes in the House next year.

In a statement to National Review, a TikTok spokesperson acknowledged that the company had received the letter from McMorris Rodgers and Comer. The spokesperson, however, ignored questions about the letter’s contents.

The BuzzFeed News report contradicted a top U.S. TikTok official’s sworn congressional testimony from last year, as well as strenuous efforts by TikTok’s other American employees to create the false impression among U.S. officials, the American public, and U.S. TikTok users that ByteDance staff in China did not have access to U.S. user data.

The report has had such a big impact, in fact, that Chew and other TikTok employees have repeatedly attempted to discredit it in public statements. The TikTok spokesperson told NR that “BuzzFeed cherry-picked quotes from meetings” about efforts to secure U.S. users’ data, and added, “We look forward to meeting with members of Congress to correct the record on BuzzFeed’s misleading reporting.”

BuzzFeed’s revelations sparked a bipartisan fury from lawmakers who said they had been misled by the Chinese tech company. In a letter to FTC chairwoman Lina Khan earlier this month, Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, who are the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, respectively, said that the report suggested that “TikTok has also misrepresented its corporate governance practices, including to Congressional committees such as ours.” They urged Khan to “act promptly” on those “repeated misrepresentations by TikTok.”