Its boss, Shou Zi Chew, appeared before US politicians at Congress where he fielded hostile questions about Chinese parent company ByteDance and how much access China has to the app's data. "The tech companies from China have had such an intense period of competition at home that has made them as good or better, in some ways, than American apps," said Zeyi Yang, a journalist and researcher for the MIT Review who specialises in Chinese technology. "There is a danger of a knee jerk reaction that anything Chinese is bad," he said