Counter Washington's habitual bullying with law

Video-sharing social networking company TikTok has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over an executive order banning any US transactions with its parent company ByteDance.

The judicial challenge to Washington's latest show of commercial bullying is not only a just act by a Chinese company to safeguard its legitimate rights, but a strong response to US abuse of state power to enforce its will and disrupt the free market.

Speaking at the daily press briefing on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said that China supports relevant companies in taking up legal weapons to safeguard their legitimate rights and interests, and will continue to take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legal rights and interests of Chinese companies.

The White House may have wanted to justify its witch-hunt against the Chinese company by resorting to the flimsy fig leaf of national security. However, according to The New York Times, even its spy agency has assessed that there is no evidence showing China has intercepted TikTok's data, or used the app to intrude on users' mobile phones.

Though the company "strongly" disagrees with the White House's so-called national security concerns, as TikTok spokesman Josh Gartner put it over the weekend, for nearly a year it has sought to engage in "good faith to provide a constructive solution."

Unfortunately, Tiktok is confronted with a government that is not shy away from blatantly stretching concept of national security and abusing its state power to bring down certain outperforming non-US enterprises.

By oppressing the Chinese company on the pretext of trumped-up charges, some US politicians have openly discarded the principles of market economy and fair competition, which they have always flaunted.

By using political manipulation to suppress the Chinese high-tech enterprise, those political elites in Washington have also put selfish interests above market principle and international rules to the detriment of US users and companies, since the video-sharing app has more than 100 million users, over 1,500 employees and thousands of business partners in the United States.

In addition, some media have already raised concerns that the US suppression of Chinese tech companies may cost US tech companies heavily by losing the Chinese market, which has the potential to be the world's biggest one.

In fact, it is nothing new for Washinton to use its state machine to suppress foreign companies by means of coercion and intimidation, to which Toshiba and Alstom both fell prey.

Take the incident of the French conglomerate Alstom as an example. In 2013, it was charged with bribery crimes, fined heavily by the US Department of Justice, and forced to restructure with the most important part of its business being acquired by an American company, just because it was poised to challenge America's leading position in the same business arena.

In recent years, other Chinese high-tech enterprises, including two leading Chinese 5G equipment providers Huawei and ZTE, have also fallen victim to US state intervention that seeks to bend the rule-based free market to US will.

As Zhao put it, the wanton actions against certain Chinese companies are in essence organized and systematic economic bullying.

By resorting to state power to pummel foreign business rivals, the hypocrisy of the so-called fair competition touted by Washington has been laid bare.

For decades, the United States has boasted of being the so-called guardian of market economy and fair competition. That mantle is now torn to shreds by those self-serving bandits-like politicians who politicize economic issues.

After TikTok filed the lawsuit against the US government, US reputation of being a country ruled by law is now under intense scrutiny.