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"So
the question is, is Microsoft going to be compromised?" Navarro
said in an interview with CNN. "Maybe Microsoft could divest its
Chinese holdings?"
President Donald Trump has agreed to give China's ByteDance 45
days to negotiate a sale of popular short-video app TikTok to
Microsoft, three people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
U.S. officials have said TikTok, under its Chinese parent, poses
a national risk because of the personal data it handles. Trump
said on Friday he was planning to ban TikTok in the United
States after dismissing the idea of a sale to Microsoft.
In an earlier interview with Fox News Channel, Navarro said any
potential buyer of TikTok that has operations in China could be
a problem.
Navarro cited Microsoft's Bing search engine and Skype platform,
saying they "effectively are enablers of Chinese censorship,
surveillance and monitoring."
Microsoft has over 6,000 employees in China and offices in
Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou.
While the company has been there for decades, business from
China accounts for just over 1% of the company's revenue,
Bloomberg reported Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer
Brad Smith stating at a conference in January.
Widespread piracy of Windows and Office once prevented the
company's cash cow from bringing in money.
The company is now pushing its Azure cloud service to customers
in China, via a partnership with local data service provider
21Vianet.
Its crown jewel is arguably a research center in Beijing, which
has produced a number of alumni who have gone on to executive
positions at Alibaba, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and facial recognition
unicorns Sensetime and Megvii.
It also was the site of origin for the so-called "ResNet" paper,
currently the most-cited AI paper according to Google scholar
metrics.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu, Susan Heavey and Pete Schroeder;
Additional reporting by Josh Horwitz; Editing by Nick Zieminski
and Christopher Cushing)
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