Chinese tech companies long looked to the United States as a key market and source of investment. Firms like ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, courted major American investment firms like General Atlantic and Susquehanna Capital. Chinese start-ups in Shanghai and Shenzhen saw an initial public offering on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange as the ultimate symbol of success.
But as relations between Washington and Beijing have grown increasingly strained, that is changing.
Companies with ties to China now face so much regulatory and political scrutiny that some companies are reconsidering going public or doing business in the United States, investors and experts said. None want to end up like TikTok, which spent years trying to deflect Washington’s concerns about its ties to China.
Popular start-ups that investors would have once considered promising candidates for U.S. listings, like the fast-fashion retailer Shein, are now looking elsewhere or waiting to list. Others are deciding not to take stakes in American companies.
“We’re at a point now where almost no major Chinese tech acquisition of a U.S. company is going to get by without serious scrutiny,” said Geoffrey Gertz, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. A lot of those deals are drying up pre-emptively, Mr. Gertz said.
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TikTok is not the first technology company with Chinese ties to face intense regulatory examination in Washington.
In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States opened a review into the Chinese company that owned Grindr, a dating app popular with gay and bisexual men. The members of the panel, known as CFIUS, had similar concerns about Grindr to the ones lawmakers have about TikTok — that the app could be used to give the Chinese government access to sensitive data about Americans, including their locations and dating preferences. CFIUS ordered Grindr’s owner, the Beijing Kunlun Tech Company, to divest.
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