Good rollup post from Tim Hardwick on the whole Microsoft wants to buy TikTok, Trump wants a piece of the action, China likely to retaliate situation.

You’ve no doubt followed this as it’s unfolded. New to the story is in this Reuters article:

China will not accept the “theft” of a Chinese technology company and is able to respond to Washington’s move to push ByteDance to sell short-video app TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft, the China Daily newspaper said on Tuesday.

The United States’ “bullying” of Chinese tech companies was a consequence of Washington’s zero-sum vision of “American first” and left China no choice but “submission or mortal combat in the tech realm”, the state-backed paper said in an editorial.

Add to that this Daring Fireball post, titled, Major American companies with a consumer internet presence in China:

if China decides to retaliate — and why wouldn’t they? — what company might they target other than Apple? Facebook and Google are already banned in China. Amazon has AWS, which has a fair-sized presence there, but AWS is sort of the anti-TikTok in terms of being consumer-facing. Microsoft would be the obvious tit-for-tat target. But does Microsoft have a neatly bundled consumer presence in China?

If I were the dictator of China, and I was angry about the Trump administration forcing a proud Chinese company like ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok, and I was looking for a way to show that China cannot be pushed around by the U.S., I’d look at iCloud and the App Store, and humiliating the biggest company in the world.

And to add to this thought, this Wall Street Journal post titled, Apple Faces $1.4 Billion Lawsuit in China in Siri Patent Fight:

Shanghai Zhizhen Network Technology Co. said Monday that it is suing Apple for an estimated 10 billion yuan ($1.43 billion) in damages in a Shanghai court, after a court decision in June that upheld the validity of its Chinese patent for a chatbot similar to Apple’s Siri.

And:

As part of the suit, Shanghai Zhizhen, also known as Xiao-i, asked Apple to stop sales, production and the use of products flouting the patent—a category that includes virtually all the U.S. company’s devices.

I agree with Gruber’s take, above. Apple does seem the likeliest target for retaliation. What a mess.