What happens to them if the short-video sensation is banned?
prospect of a ban hanging over TikTok, its 170m American users may start looking for an alternative time-sink. They could plump for Bigo Live, popular for TikTokish live-streaming. Or Likee, which offers similar video-editing and sharing options and has more than 100m users around the world. There is also Hago, which blends social media and video games, and which has clocked up some 500m downloads.
The three apps are similar to TikTok in another way, too. The firm that makes them, Joyy, is based in Singapore, just like TikTok. And like ByteDance, TikTok’s parent firm, Joyy’s controlling shareholder, called Huanju, is based in mainland China. ByteDance and Huanju are among dozens of Chinese firms that are thriving on the free-wheeling Western internet, away from China’s censors. They develop apps for everything from gaming and social media to fitness and photo-editing. Many have set up headquarters outside China, often in Singapore, and do not advertise their Chineseness. Plenty dispute the notion that they are Chinese at all.
According to Sensor Tower, a research firm, a Shanghainese video-gaming firm called MiHoYo last year outperformed even Tencent, a Chinese games powerhouse, when it came to foreign revenues from video games . The 30 biggest Chinese video-game makers account for 18% of the industry’s global sales outside China. Chinese-linked e-commerce apps have been similarly successful.
Other Chinese services are also pushing into America. Daily Yoga, an app popular with exercise aficionados, is owned by a company from the Chinese city of Xi’an. Bestie-Portrait, a photo-editor, has Chinese owners. CapCut, one of the world’s most popular video-editing apps, is owned by ByteDance. So is Lemon8, a photo- and video-sharing app similar to Instagram.
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