Oh they care. A lot. They care about anything that gives them access to western data so that's just wrong. They care quite a lot about TikTok as it provides a potential backdoor (given that the CCP defacto owns bytedance)
Like, when a President who disagrees publicly with his own intelligence agencies claims that something is the result of intelligence, I am very sceptical.
I'm very sceptical of US intelligence justifications in general (and have been since 2003) but even more so under the current administration.
"I love FT and I subscribe to the paper but I see more anti-trump sentiment than an actual argument there. "
I really don't see any anti-Trump sentiment there, can you clarify what you mean?
Or at least they didn't, until this happened.
They would care about Tencent or Alibaba, but ByteDance isn't big or important enough for the party to care.