Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

BILL FLAIG: Big Tech’s China Problem Is America’s National Security Problem

TikTok on iPhone in hand in a cafe or coffee shop. (Flickr/https://nordskovmedia.dk/)

For years, Washington has warned about the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term strategy to dominate global technology, data, and information flows. What has not received nearly enough scrutiny is how willingly major American technology companies have accommodated that strategy, often at the expense of our values, our laws, and U.S. national security.

American investors large and small, public and private are complicit, either begrudgingly or willingly supporting these companies’ endeavors. Ignorance is never an excuse. This is not speculation. It is documented behavior.

Take Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world. Apple has deep manufacturing ties to China, but the relationship goes far beyond supply chains. To comply with Chinese law, Apple moved Chinese iCloud user data to servers operated by a state-linked Chinese firm, Guizhou Cloud Big Data. Encryption keys were also stored in China, giving Beijing legal leverage to access user data under China’s sweeping national security laws.

Apple has removed apps at the direction of Chinese authorities, including VPN services used to evade censorship, while simultaneously marketing itself in the United States as a champion of privacy.

Then there is Google, which famously abandoned the Chinese market in 2010 over censorship concerns, only to quietly explore reentry years later. Internal documents revealed Google’s work on “Project Dragonfly,” a censored search engine tailored to CCP demands. The project was shelved after internal backlash, but the episode exposed a disturbing willingness to compromise on free expression if the market opportunity is large enough.

Meta has followed a similar pattern. Although its platforms are officially blocked in China, public reporting and whistleblower accounts have shown that Meta actively explored ways to align its content moderation tools with Chinese censorship standards in pursuit of eventual market access.

This included discussions about suppressing politically sensitive content and granting greater control over information flows. While Meta executives now speak forcefully about China as a strategic threat, the company’s history suggests that profit has often taken precedence over principle when the Chinese market was in view.

Amazon deserves equal scrutiny. While often viewed primarily as a retail and cloud services giant, Amazon has longstanding business relationships in China, including partnerships with Chinese cloud service providers and sellers operating under CCP regulatory oversight.

Amazon Web Services has worked with Chinese state-linked entities in the past, raising serious questions about data exposure, intellectual property risks, and technology transfer. At the same time, Amazon has complied with Chinese government demands to remove politically sensitive books and content from its Chinese platforms. When an American company that controls critical cloud infrastructure is willing to tailor its operations to authoritarian demands, the national security implications are impossible to ignore.

Amazon’s marketplace, supply chain, and content decisions are now deeply influenced by China because the company depends on Chinese sellers, Chinese manufacturing, and Chinese regulatory approval,  a combination that creates economic and political leverage Beijing can exploit.

The most glaring example remains TikTok, currently in limbo. TikTok is not simply a popular app. It is a massive data collection platform operating under Chinese law, which requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence services. Multiple investigations have confirmed that TikTok data has been accessed by personnel in China. Former executives have acknowledged that the CCP can exert influence over the company’s operations. This is why bipartisan majorities in Congress, intelligence agencies, and U.S. allies have all raised alarms.

Our concern runs far beyond consumer apps. American venture capital and corporate partnerships have helped fuel the rise of Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba, companies deeply intertwined with the Chinese state and its surveillance apparatus. These firms play direct roles in censorship, facial recognition, and population monitoring within China, including in regions where human rights abuses are well documented.

What ties all of this together is China’s legal and political reality. Under China’s National Intelligence Law, there is no meaningful separation between private enterprise and the state. Companies must comply with intelligence requests and are prohibited from disclosing them. When American firms partner with Chinese entities or operate inside China, they are operating in an ecosystem where the rules are written by the CCP and enforced without transparency or judicial independence.

This should set off alarm bells across Washington and Silicon Valley alike.

The United States is engaged in strategic competition with a regime that openly seeks to displace American leadership, export digital authoritarianism, and control critical technologies. When the nation’s security concerns are this significant and this glaring, capitalism’s animal instincts must take a back seat to national security. These are American companies, after all, and with that status comes responsibility.

This is not about isolationism or rejecting global trade. It is about realism. America cannot credibly defend free expression, privacy, and national security while its most powerful corporations bend the knee to an authoritarian regime that rejects all three.

Congress has begun to wake up to this reality, but incremental hearings and press releases are not enough. Transparency requirements, stricter data security standards, and real consequences for companies that place access to the Chinese market above American interests are long overdue.

Big Tech’s entanglement with the CCP is not a future risk. It is a present danger. The question is no longer whether Big Tech will continue to undermine Americans with the help of the CCP, but whether investors will stop pretending to be surprised when it does.

Bill Flaig is the CEO and Co-Founder of The American Conservatives Values ETF (ACVF). Learn more at https://investconservative.com/

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Flickr/https://nordskovmedia.dk/)