Unfortunately, this opinion piece risks the distortion of reality with its loose interpretation of the politics surrounding US and China.

As someone with a Chinese last name and face, I would love to blame all this on Trump and say it has nothing to do with China. But I work with Chinese natives and they tell me the surveilance in China is very real.

We are privileged to live in Western societies where the surveilance is only mild compared to China. A student of mine even had to leave China due to fear of being persecuted for his Muslim religion. A few of his family friends even disappeared and were never heard from again. I have many other testimonies, but that's beside the point.

I'm not a US citizen, so I'm not qualified to give opinions about your president. But there's video evidence that Trump has actually been arguing against China since the 90's. Issues such as deliberately devaluing their currency to secure deals in foreign markets, etc. This banning seems to be about low trust between US and China, and not so much about 'controlling the youth'.

If that were the case, it would make more sense to seize complete control of Facebook's data. Not all the youth are on Tik Tok, and we give far more information to Facebook than Tik Tok.