Jan 07, 2021, 15:18
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order banning transactions with eight Chinese apps, including popular Chinese payment apps Alipay and WeChat Pay, over privacy concerns.
The other apps are CamScanner, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate and WPS Office. The executive order goes into effect in 45 days. Trump leaves office in two weeks.
The president said in the order that the apps can access private information from their users. That information could be used to "track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, and build dossiers of personal information", he said.
The order instructs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to evaluate other apps that could pose a "national security threat".
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Wednesday that the ban is another example of the United States abusing national power to unjustifiably crack down on foreign companies. The order will have some impact on related Chinese companies, but more importantly, it will harm the interests of US consumers and the interests of the US.
She urged the US to respect the principles of the market economy and fair competition and abide by international economic and trade rules to provide an open, fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for foreign companies, including Chinese ones, to invest and operate in the country. She added that China would take necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights of Chinese companies.
Kingsoft Office, a Chinese software and internet service provider, said in a statement on Wednesday that the US government's ban on its office software WPS Office will not have a substantial impact on its development in the short term. WPS Office has more than 100 million users in overseas markets and most of them use the software for free. It only involves a small amount of advertising business.
"The company continues to pay attention to overseas markets and is also reviewing the possible consequences of the US government order to clarify its possible impact on the company. We will release further announcements in due course," Kingsoft Office added.
The Trump administration has targeted Chinese-owned social media applications, claiming that they pose a national security risk.
In August, Trump issued two executive orders banning TikTok, a popular video-sharing app owned by Chinese company Byte-Dance, and social networking app WeChat, which belongs to Tencent.
Both orders have faced legal challenges. The order banning downloads of WeChat in the US was blocked by a federal judge in September shortly after it was scheduled to take effect.
Two federal judges also separately blocked the order concerning TikTok, which would have restricted US transactions with the company, effectively banning the app in the US.
Thanks to the courts' ruling, both apps currently continue to operate in the US. The Trump administration has sought to overturn the rulings.
Doubts expressed
Trump's latest ban on Chinese apps has drawn an immediate reaction from Chinese communities in the US. At an online forum on WenxueCity, a website for Chinese people living in the US, some users expressed doubt over whether the order would really go into effect since TikTok and WeChat still operate.
Alipay, owned by Chinese financial-technology giant Ant Group, has more than 1 billion users. Alipay and WeChat Pay are the two most popular payment apps, which jointly account for 90 percent of China's mobile payment market.
A large number of merchants in the US have started to accept payment via Alipay, according to the company.
This is plainly another attempt to lay more minefields for Biden before the latter takes over.
Achieving no strategic purpose with these haphazard acts, his sole aim is to leave traps for the incoming president-elect.
Biden can easily reverse these policies when Donald leaves office.
What China needs to do is to draw a list of countermeasures in the future spelling out in no uncertain terms what it would do in response to U.S. challenges.
I am pretty sure various groups of mercenary sharpshooters have been trained and prepared for assassination now that the American president has made it seem like a matter of certainty.
Under any rule of law, a charge will be considered frivolous if it is not backed by proof of evidence. The Trump charge that TikTok and WeChat were a national security concern was therefore thrown out by his own US court system since no proof of evidence that US national security was compromised was produced.
After all, anyone can fabricate a concern but for a charge to stick, there must be proof to justify and validate the charge.
If TikTok was willing to be sold to Oracle and Huawei was willing to release its source code, in what way then are they non-transparent for international use and national securities?
Likewise the charges against all the other China tech applications and tech companies should get the same court decision - unless the US court system itself is also being compromised for political motives.
Right now, US democracy is imploding after the insurrection in the US Capitol and if the US court system does not uphold international rules of law by rejecting the mischiefs of Trump, Ross, O'Brien and others so near their administrative termination, the reputation of any US institutional system will become pariah status. Biden's Sullivan should also look at his own shadow.
Meanwhile, Assange is languishing after being hunted across the globe for having exposed how the US National Security Agency and the US' CIA have been spying on other countries including its Atlantic and Asian allies using their PRISM telecommunications surveillance system.
Like a thief declaring it is being robbed, it's therefore hypocritical of the US to try and tarnish other countries on the presumption of its own national security concerns when it has been the culprit all along from the very beginning.
Moreover, by February 8th, Facebook will import its WhatsApp customer data to create a seamless cross-platform with its Instagram and Messenger user data that will give it an expanded hold on millions of user privacies with view to online payment across the globe. Given that Facebook like Google has been approached by US security agencies, other nations must by now realize what is under threat in the world is not US national security but their national security. It is in fact virtual hegemony that is inexcusably and hypocritically non-virtuous.
Which perhaps explains why Europe is fast-tracking a USD30 Billion fund program to establish its own digital sovereignty for semiconductor technologies.
Merkel and Macron should seize the opportunity to accelerate towards tech decoupling from US two-faced suppression on European tech companies (and thus their survival in the near future) by working more strongly with China on the wave of new and more CAI ventures to roll out in tandem with China's new 10-year technology development program, thereby providing European industries and research personnel the one opportunity to unshackle themselves from US tech hegemony that has been crimping the second renaissance of Europe.
At the same time, the EU must also not under any circumstances let some of its parliamentarians who have been influenced by the US to try and subvert the CAI by attacking China's internal security matters such as Hong Kong with view to destabilizing those parts of China so as to be in favor of some dubious and verbiose notion of yet another 'grand alliance'.
After all, stability is key to investment and market growth with both being keys to future reforms, and the record is unassailable that a stable and prosperous China has brought prosperity to Europe all these years, all the more needed now in the aftermath of one of the most economically damaging pandemics in human history.
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