When I worked in Congress, much of my energy was focused on state-owned Chinese companies and their shameless banditry of U.S. citizens’ private data. We put quite a bit of elbow grease into banning Huawei and TikTok not just for the naked national-security risks they posed, but because their intrusions into Americans’ private lives were profoundly creepy and immoral.
No deed goes unpunished. My professional interest in state-level data banditry has frequently been rewarded by some Bay Area algorithm feeding me irksome ads from every PR campaign under the sky that relates to privacy or communist China. The latest interrupted an otherwise pleasant experience scrolling through Instagram brisket and BBQ reels. Here is the ad:
Maybe it’s my D.C. metro-area geodata that subjects me to these incessant and stupid marketing offensives. There’s an old farmhand saying that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Anti-China sentiment makes for a platinum-quality policy argument in Congress these days, so I get that every lobbyist and PR firm in the city wants to turn every piece of legislation into a debate about the People’s Liberation Army. Beijing deserves the ire it invites from U.S. officials and consumers. But using a good argument to push a dumb bill does not make the dumb bill a good idea.
Consider how in 2021, with worry about the price of groceries and gas raging, President Biden sold a huge new government spending bill as the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Reducing inflation is good. But saying that you are reducing inflation by doing the very things that increase inflation, printing and spending money, is bad and dishonest. I know you all share my shock that, two years after the bill was passed, inflation remains sticky.
The ad shares President Biden’s faith in your stupidity. It hijacks a good argument to push a dumb law, the Credit Card Competition Act, legislation that annoys me deeply and has mercifully been thus far unable to escape committee. The bill was first sold as “more choice and competition” for businesses. I like choice and competition. I do not like choice and competition when the new friend that you are inviting to the pickleball court is a massive Chinese-state-owned credit-card corporation.
To put a finer point on it, I do not want a server in mainland China logging every time you buy Weedwacker string at Home Depot. Like I said, most of my energy in over half a decade in Congress was committed to protecting American citizens from Beijing’s insatiable hunger for your data. UnionPay, the Shanghai banking services company that is trying to use this dumb credit-card bill to elbow its way into U.S. markets, is amongst the network of muscle behind the fresh scrimmage for American user data.
Companies on the Chinese mainland, like UnionPay, have seen what’s happened to TikTok and Huawei. They’re scared and learning fast. Because UnionPay’s threat to your data lies in its 20 year partnership and network with legitimate U.S. companies, their lobbyists preemptively banned themselves in the Credit Card Competition Act. Why set up shop in downtown Omaha when your network partners can do it for you? Data moves seamlessly regardless, what’s important is that they can expand globally and penetrate U.S. markets and your privacy.
This is all a splash effect from the TikTok and Huawei bans. Chinese state-owned companies are restricting themselves on their terms (not ours), relying on their U.S. partners do their dirty work, and attacking their American competitors for being pro-China. Let no fair-minded voter challenge the assumption that we live in very stupid times.
Meanwhile, TikTok execs are probably kicking themselves right now for not teaming up with Facebook five years ago. . . .