I think you are overestimating how much Tiktok means to the Chinese government.
Tiktok's international success is basically an accident, not one planned and supported by the government. Bytedance's founder is (or at least, was) even a pro-US guy, having publicly made pro-US statements in China.
China didn't do much after India banned a whole boatload of apps and investors.
My bet is that pakistan will wind up with Eastasia, but if they're willing to cozy up with india, I'll admit they have an excellent shot, as a legacy admit, to join Oceania.
The Indian nationalists have been dreaming up such a situation since basically forever (so long as Pakistanis were willing to give up that whole pesky Islam thing), but let's just say that current relations aren't necessarily cozy. How would such a situation change?
It would have to change, if pakistan were to side with the commonwealth instead of promoting a trade route through Karachi that could cut out the middleman of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca. But I think we both think that with a few of those size "ifs" we could put Paris in a bottle.
Nah most likely Pakistani gov will deal with corporate TikTok to hire local content moderators. Cynical me even believe that this is a low hanging fruit attempts to get a deal from TikTok HQ.
The debt is real, but it represents money Chinese banks have already transferred. This does not increase the Chinese government's influence; on the contrary, it will require influence to get the recipient countries to pay back at least part of the amount.
It would be different if the payments had been conditional on doing whatever the Chinese government wants, but most of the lending up to 2016 was made with little oversight (which is why the sum is so high) and only after several high-profile project failures (e.g. the port of Hambantota, where after a debt-for-equity swap, a Chinese consortium is stuck operating it to try recoup the construction costs), the criteria for issuing new loans were made more strict, similar to those of other institutions like the World Bank.
The bitter lesson for the Chinese development finance industry is that "publicly guaranteed debt" is not very guaranteed when a new government comes to power every few years and wants to renegotiate the terms of agreements made with the previous government.
Yes, and that's a bad thing for the Chinese investors.
As an analogy, consider a bank giving someone a loan to build a house. In case of default, they'll repossess the house to recoup some of the amount.
Does this mean it's a good idea for a bank to give huge loans to people who they know won't be able to pay it back, so that they'll get the house? Obviously not! Repossession only avoids losing the full amount of the loan; the bank is still making a loss overall.
Laos ceding majority ownership of the power grid to the Chinese company that built it only means that the infrastructure investment isn't as profitable as expected (otherwise they could just use the profits to service the loan) and they're cutting their losses.
I think the point is that it's about more than just financials. If you own the national grid for a country, you can have a lot more political influence than before.
"We're more than happy to provide the necessary grid updates, but we're going to need to see some reciprocation, maybe sign that military base lease we asked for?"
Even so, surely we can raise the bar of geopolitical conversation above hunches and feelings. Someone has to basically guess at the specifics of your argument to respond.
Tiktok's international success is basically an accident, not one planned and supported by the government. Bytedance's founder is (or at least, was) even a pro-US guy, having publicly made pro-US statements in China.
China didn't do much after India banned a whole boatload of apps and investors.