| Hi all, this is Zheping in Hong Kong. U.S. President Donald Trump has made "tough on China" a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, repeatedly hammering the message in a speech on Monday accepting the Republican nomination for president. Now, many Chinese tech giants are rushing to ensure their global expansion plans won't be thwarted by the American leader, and are rolling out strategies that are becoming part of a familiar playbook. TikTok, of course, has been in the most heated battle with U.S. regulators so far. On Monday, the company filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, asking the court to prevent it from being banned in the country. The suit is the biggest escalation yet in parent company ByteDance Ltd.'s fight to keep hold of its first truly globally successful product. The social media juggernaut now has until Nov. 12 to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to an American suitor, with pursuers including Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. TikTok has brought out a battery of tactics in its crusade to keep doing business in the U.S. Since the dispute began almost a year ago, the app has said it stores American user data in the U.S. and Singapore (not China), and that it has set up internal firewalls to restrict employee access. TikTok also hired an American chief executive officer, says it wants to create thousands of U.S. jobs and just spent a record sum on federal lobbying. On top of all that, TikTok has emphasized that its U.S. app has nothing to do with its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, which deploys heavy censorship to meet Beijing's rules. ByteDance's larger social-media rival, meanwhile, appears to be in a slightly better position. Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s super-app WeChat has more than 19 million daily active users in the U.S., and was slated to be banned along with TikTok in Trump's Aug. 6 order, but the administration is now seeking to reassure companies like Apple Inc., with a large presence in China, that the sanction won't be as broad as feared, Bloomberg News has reported. Still, Tencent is deploying many of the same tactics as TikTok. It's stressed that its global product WeChat is separate from Weixin, which is focused on China. Tencent hired its first lobbyist in Washington, a former Treasury Department deputy general counsel. And while the company has yet to take any legal action, a group of WeChat users has filed a complaint in federal court in San Francisco claiming Trump's ban on the app is unconstitutional. But it's not just the companies threatened by bans that are gearing up their PR machines. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. seems already to be working to mitigate the threats from the U.S.-China trade war. Alibaba chief Daniel Zhang said on an earnings call last week that the e-commerce giant is watching the latest shift in U.S. policy toward Chinese companies closely, describing it as a "very fluid situation." He also didn't forget to play the job card: "Alibaba's primary commercial focus in the U.S. is to support American brands, retailers, small businesses and farmers" selling their wares abroad, he said. In other words, at Alibaba—and companies like it—the campaign to stay out of Trump's crosshairs is already well underway. —Zheping Huang | 
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