Why do you think the Chinese government would care what we do? We aren’t important people. TikTok is one thing, there’s a way influence public opinion because people are stupid, but Temu?
Same thing as TT. TT might have an influence on public opinion (among some demographics) but for the Chinese government, that's just to identify and influence the latest trends.
They don't necessarily care what each of us do or buy, or where we go on the internet, as individuals, because just as you say, most of us aren't important people.
What they do care about is the aggregated information from millions of us unimportant people. What are the current "lifestyle" trends that people actually buy, and how much of those are driven or influenced by TT or other influencer-driven sites? How can they make TT more influential? What brands do the most people buy from and how should they imitate them or steal their intellectual property without getting caught, what price points are the cut-off for a certain percentage of people, what quality defects are red-flags for the most amount of people? And what quality defects can they get away with for the highest percentage of overseas buyers? What is the exact percentage of cheap crap they can get away with selling, and how many fake reviews does it take to drive up that percentage point into how much profitability?
Yes,
Amazon and other sellers, pretty much everyone who sells things online (the company I work for as well) does their best to do the same, by analyzing aggregated customer information.
But!
I believe the stealing of CC information and intellectual property rights are not directly done or paid for by the Chinese government, only because they don't want to be seen as breaking International Trade treaties. I DO believe they outsource many of these aggregated-information-analysis tasks to hacking companies, and turn a blind eye to other things those companies may be doing or generating profits from, like selling CC card information, names and addresses to hackers, getting in the backdoor of smaller sellers who might not be able to afford sophisticated security protocols to steal their intellectual property rights.
Sorry this was so TL,DR! It just happened to be today, that at work I had to take a class about all this stuff to keep our logistics compliant with Customs and border controls and internet security. The class didn't point out anything negative about China at all, I just couldn't help but draw conclusions.
