The New York Times SUBSCRIBE NOW LOG IN Opinion Trump Is Wrong About TikTok. China’s Plans Are Much More Sinister. The West still doesn’t understand the scale of Beijing’s soft-power ambitions. By Yi-Zheng Lian Mr. Lian is a former chief editor of The Hong Kong Economic Journal. Sept. 17, 2020 Image Credit... Torsten Blackwood/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Share on Facebook Post on Twitter Mail This article has been updated to reflect news developments. The Trump administration announced on Friday that starting on Sunday, it will ban the popular short-video app TikTok from app stores in the United States. The issue, the administration says, is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese, and Washington is worried that the personal data of the many millions of Americans using the app could be siphoned off to China and misused. ADVERTISEMENT And there are many more smaller, but no less dangerous, Chinese entities or entities with strong C...