‘Peaceful Asymmetric Warfare’: China’s Tech War With the US

Imagine that someone came along, swiped your DNA, and cloned you. The clone, however, wasn’t a physical copy of you, but a digital one. The clone started out as bits and pieces of you, using the digital DNA that you had left scattered all over the Web. As you went about your daily life, more of you was swept up, creating an ever-clearer digital character of you. Your messages, texts, posts, purchases, travels, reading habits, political inclinations, personal life, hopes, and dreams, indeed everything that makes up who you are in character and lifestyle eventually got fed into the digital representation of you, living vicariously in your creator’s databases.

As you develop in the digital womb that is your digital parent’s servers, a conversation begins. Learning all about you allows your digital maker to feed you with information, ideas, and inspirations that it wants you to have. It also lets your digital parent introduce you to other digital clones that complement your personality and your purpose in life.

Meet your digital twin.

In an exclusive interview with The Diplomat, Col. John Mills, U.S. Army (Ret.), a national intelligence expert and the former director of cybersecurity policy, strategy, and international affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said the phenomenon of digital twinning and targeting is the impetus behind the executive order issued by U.S. President Donald Trump prohibiting “any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd. (a.k.a. Zìjié Tiàodòng), Beijing, China, or its subsidiaries.”

ByteDance is the creator and owner of the TikTok app, which has over 800 million active users worldwide, 165 million of them in the United States.

“What TikTok is able to do is to collect [data] on an incredible scale, worldwide,” Mills said.  

What’s worse, he said, is that “people pooh-pooh this, don’t understand it, the experts seem to not care. It’s baffling with what’s going on here.”

Chinese tech firms, according to Mills, “took the big data concepts of 10 years ago and put them on super-steroids.” 

“We’ve complained about Amazon and Google, and I’m not passing judgment on Amazon and Google, but think of [them] on an exponentially larger scale, with absolute nefarious intent,” he said, referring to ByteDance and its TikTok app.

With that ability, Mills continued, “they can laser target us with ads, with things that push our buttons, think of... social unrest.”

“They Can Pit These Groups Against Each Other”

The power of this level of data aggregation and analysis, however, is not limited to the now-familiar phenomenon of searching for a sofa online and then spending days seeing ads for sofas on your Facebook and news feeds.

Asked if these digital twins aren’t a little bit like cutting our lives into a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle for someone else to slowly piece together, Mills suggested that the puzzle analogy goes much further.

“The puzzle aspect is how do those... millions [of people] interact with each other, who is talking to who, who fits in what demographic, who thinks alike? Do we like fast food, do we like to watch YouTube videos of cats?” 

But more critically, people who possess mass amounts of data “can group us on a wide scale to divide up a population,” Mills said. “That’s what’s going on with some of the social unrest.”

This is what gives an app like TikTok such power. It not only collects data on a massive scale, it has a “rapid capability to sort and size the population, and push some buttons.”

Asked if this capability extends to creating not only individual digital profiles, but also to creating groups that we ourselves may not even know about, Mills said, “Yes, and they can pit these groups against each other.”  

In his telling, the first wave of collecting and analyzing “big data” was established in 2005 by the Five Eyes intelligence community. Those five closely allied countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – “trail-blazed big data collection and big data analysis for intel purposes.”

“The second wave was Amazon and Google doing it for business purposes. The third wave is essentially the Chinese doing this for unconstrained nation-state purposes,” Mills said.

“Peaceful Asymmetric Warfare”

There are those who scoff at the idea that the Chinese government would or even could force the owners of TikTok and other Chinese apps to give up their “secrets,” starting with that digital twin of you. The reality is that every Chinese business is tethered to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). ByteDance, TikTok’s creator and owner, is no exception; on the contrary, it is a poster child for the role that top technology companies in China play in advancing the CCP’s, and therefore the government’s, agenda.

Nothing could better illuminate the symbiotic relationship between ByteDance and the Chinese government than its partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, announced in an April 25, 2019 ceremony in Beijing, as Chinese-language Sohu reported.

By signing a “strategic cooperation agreement” with the ministry, ByteDance and the Public Security Ministry, using the Chinese version of TikTok known as Douyin, are creating a “new national security media matrix” for use by China’s public security organs.

A deeper dive into that agreement underscores not only the power of TikTok’s parent company in China, but also the extent to which it fully cooperates with the instruments of social monitoring and control in the People’s Republic.

China’s security enterprise is known as one of the most ubiquitous and repressive in the world. What could be so powerful about an app that targets teenagers to make and view 15-second music videos that the Chinese Ministry of Public Security has made it a key plank of nationwide law enforcement?

Zhan Jun, CCP secretary and director of the ministry’s Press and Propaganda Bureau, elaborated on that at the signing ceremony.

“Public security agencies across the country have actively adapted to the profound changes in the ecology of social public opinion, media communication patterns, and audience reading habits in the all-media era,” he said.  

The collaboration with ByteDance will allow China’s public security forces “to have a voice, tell police stories, build a good team image, and close the relationship between the police and the people,” Zhan said.  

Moreover, public safety will now be able “to create a large number of socially influential new public security media accounts... In the next step, we will further increase the in-depth cooperation with ByteDance in the creation and production of new media content, further enhance the power of public security propaganda and communication, influence, and credibility, and promote the in-depth development of media integration into public security organs.”

If ByteDance can empower the security forces of a one-party authoritarian state by using the digital twins and groups it creates from Chinese data, then it can empower those same forces with the data it gathers from the rest of the world.

As Mills put it, “Every company in China is an extension of the nation-state. The primary goal is simple: It’s to replace the United States.” The term may seem like “a bit of an oxymoron,” Mills said, “but they would prefer peaceful asymmetric warfare.” TikTok and similar big data Chinese apps are frontline soldiers in that war.