Our picks: China syndromeChina’s Imperial Ambition | TikTok’s “Spyware” Risk? | Hard-Line Chinese Intellectuals, and more

“Clean Up This Mess”: The Chinese Thinkers Behind Xi’s Hard Line (Chris Buckley, New York Times)
Chinese academics have been honing the Communist Party’s authoritarian response in Hong Kong, rejecting the liberal ideas of their youth.

China’s Emerging Middle Eastern Kingdom (Michael Doran and Peter Rough, Tablet)
China’s drive for supremacy is now underway in the Middle East—and it won’t end there

Iran’s Pact with China Is Bad News for the West (Alam Saleh and Zakiyeh Yazdanshenas, Foreign Policy)
Tehran’s new strategic partnership with Beijing will give the Chinese a strategic foothold and strengthen Iran’s economy and regional clout.

TikTok Is Inane. China’s Imperial Ambition Is Not. (Niall Ferguson, Bloomberg)
The U.S. won the Cold War by exporting its values, and China has a similar plan for Cold War II.

Is This Trump’s Real TikTok ‘Spyware’ Risk? (Zak Doffman, Forbes)
There’s a serious risk looming for President Trump in his fiery battle with TikTok—it hasn’t had much of a mention yet, but it will. If the next 44 days progress as planned, if Microsoft or an alternative U.S. suitor finds itself with the keys to TikTok, then overnight everything will change. And that could result in a seriously difficult problem for the administration.
As I’ve said repeatedly since the U.S. signaled its intention to censure this video-sharing app, TikTok is not spying on you. There is no evidence that suggests otherwise. Yes, TikTok does collect plenty of data—but so do all social media platforms. That data is fairly transparent and would be of little interest to a national security agency across millions of users.
How do we know this? Security experts have reverse engineered the app, captured its data flows, analyzed its activity. How those reports are nuanced is critical. You can attack as intrusive all social media apps for tagging locations, phone IDs and activity on their platforms. It’s a grey area. But it’s a world away from apps that secretly exfiltrate other data—credentials. contacts, browser history, files, photos, feeds from cameras and microphones. When we speak of spyware, that’s what we mean.

Chinese Tech Companies Could Face Trouble in Europe (Laurens Cerulus et al., Politico)
After Huawei, all eyes are on TikTok. But security hawks are also looking at other Chinese tech firms.

Why Is the United States Effectively Banning WeChat and TikTok?(James Palmer, Foreign Policy)
Apps are just the latest frontier in the U.S.-China contest. Washington is signaling to global firms the risks of doing business with Beijing.