Tech cold war between US, China inflamed over app flap
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump’s bans on two popular Chinese social media apps — TikTok and WeChat — are the latest moves in an escalating U.S.China rift, and point to a future where technology and innovation are increasingly walled behind political barriers.
In China, the Communist Party has long limited what foreign tech companies can do. It blocks access to major U.S. internet services, like Google and Facebook, along with thousands of websites operated by news organizations and human rights, prodemocracy and other activist groups.
Those restrictions have helped nurture homegrown tech giants that in recent years have started expanding, and even dominating, outside China.
Now the U.S. and other countries are putting their own limits on China.
The executive orders from the White House are vague. But experts said they appear intended to bar TikTok and WeChat from app stores run by Apple and Google when the orders take effect in about six weeks.
“This is a pretty broad and pretty quick expansion of the technology cold war between the U.S. and China,” said Steven Weber, faculty director for the University of California, Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.
The Trump administration has been hawkish against China. A big example is Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of smartphones and network equipment, and China’s first global tech brand. Washington has moved to cut off Huawei Technologies Ltd.’s access to chips and other technology, tried to push allies away from Huawei and barred U.S. government funds from being used to pay for Huawei equipment in U.S. networks, citing security concerns.
Now it’s going after popular services used by millions globally. The effort is driven in part by Trump’s anger at Beijing, blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic and for hurting his reelection chances, according to two White House officials not authorized to speak publicly about private deliberations.
China’s so-called Great Firewall has allowed internet powerhouses like ecommerce giant Alibaba, social media company Baidu and WeChat owner Tencent to amass hundreds of millions of users — in some cases over a billion. For context, Facebook says it has more than 3 billion users across its various apps.
But Bytedance’s TikTok has run into obstacles outside China. In the U.S., where TikTok says it has 100 million users, it may have to sell to Microsoft because of the U.S. government’s national security concerns. China’s authoritarian government can demand access to data from companies, a concern that has also dogged Huawei. TikTok maintains that it does not share user data with the Chinese government nor censor content at its request. It suggested it would sue to make sure it and its user were “treated fairly.”
WeChat, which has more than 1 billion users, is less well-known than TikTok to Americans without a connection
to China. Mobile research firm Sensor Tower estimates about 19 million U.S. downloads of the app. But it is crucial infrastructure for Chinese students and residents in the U.S. to connect with friends and family in China, as well as for anyone who does business with China.