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On Wednesday, the House is set to vote on a bill introduced by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) that would ban or force the sale of the social video-sharing app TikTok. The bill is based on concerns that the Chinese Communist Party effectively controls ByteDance, the app's parent company. Last Friday, President Joe Biden endorsed the legislation and promised to sign it into law if Congress passes it.he vote comes nearly a year after the RESTRICT Act, the last major congressional attempt to ban TikTok, fell apart. While it was framed as a TikTok ban, a closer look at the RESTRICT Act revealed that the bill would grant the executive branch extensive powers to monitor and suppress many legitimate activities that Americans conduct online.

At the time, I wrote an article laying out how the RESTRICT Act’s “expansive and unspecific” language made the bill a threat to the property rights of American citizens. While the language of Representative Gallagher’s bill is more precise, it still gives the government room to expand far beyond TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. So many of the threats to Americans’ rights that I detailed last year remain.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that granting the United States government more power to control what information Americans are allowed to see online is not something to be concerned about. Will this bill actually make Americans safer? After all, wouldn’t a small additional rights infringement on a population whose rights are already heavily infringed upon be worth it if it fends off a much larger threat to the rights of Americans from a foreign adversary?

Perhaps. But that is certainly not an accurate characterization of the current situation.

There is no evidence that the Chinese government has any intention or desire to invade and conquer territory claimed by the United States. No serious geopolitical analyst makes this claim. And even when the most fervent China hawks cite China’s “imperial ambitions,” they refer not to some imminent military threat to the US but to the ongoing struggle for control of China’s near abroad.

For decades, the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, DC, have decided that they are the ones who ought to control the waters surrounding the Chinese mainland.

As I explained last fall, the Chinese Communist Party relies on a growing economy to maintain its legitimacy in the eyes of the 1.4 billion people living under its autocratic regime, and the modern Chinese economy is almost entirely reliant on maritime trade. However, because China’s coast is surrounded by other island nations, Chinese vessels need to navigate through and around waters claimed by other governments to access the world’s oceans.

So, any competing territorial claims off China’s coast will already be a source of tremendous anxiety for the Chinese government. On top of that, however, Washington has decided to maintain a heavy naval presence in the region, in addition to hundreds of heavily armed US bases. The US government has also made numerous weapons deals and defense agreements with nearby island nations, including Taiwan.

The struggle for political control over Taiwan is widely considered the top flash point in the region today. The dynamic can best be understood as a stalemate in an almost century-old Chinese civil war. As Brad Pearce stated in an article last year, Washington holds a bizarre official position on the conflict: