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Make room, Huawei: Donald Trump keeps adding to his list of tech nemeses. Earlier this month, the US president signed executive orders—effective Sept. 20—that ban US companies from doing business with TikTok and WeChat. Today we’re looking at WeChat, and who Trump’s decision could impact the most.
But first, a recap: Walmart is spending $3.3 million a day on cleaning and PPE, Uber and Lyft might exit California, and Amazon lost a court battle over third-party sellers. The carbon-capture business model is broken, but the “climate voter” is ascendant. So is spiked seltzer.
Your most-read story this week: How to break free of bureaucracy in the workplace. And to whoever was reading DIY podcasting isn’t as cheap as you think, don’t get discouraged! Give that podcast a shot.
Okay, unlock your screens and ready your thumbs. It’s time WeChat.
Achilles’ heel
While the scope of Trump’s executive order has yet to be defined, one thing is clear: TikTok may be more familiar to the average American, but banning WeChat has far deeper implications for both the US and China.
WeChat is no mere messaging app. It’s an all-encompassing utility: a social network, digital wallet, chat app, and all-seeing government eye rolled into one. As Beijing over the years banned ever more foreign apps, WeChat grew to be the dominant space for people’s digital lives in China. That’s also what makes it such a vulnerable target: Trump’s WeChat ban threatens to disrupt the communications of the global Chinese diaspora, who depend on the app to stay in touch with relatives and friends back home.
For American companies with operations in China, a WeChat ban could pose serious headaches. Even if it only covers WeChat-related transactions—versus every transaction related to the app’s parent company, Tencent—businesses like McDonalds and Starbucks would have to cease using WeChat Pay for customer purchases. Apple and Google would have to remove WeChat from their app stores. Companies like Walmart and Nike, which rely on WeChat to market their wares, would also be hit. Even American casinos in Macau may feel the pinch.
But while WeChat is often described as a bridge between China and the world, that bridge goes both ways. “I think WeChat is…a prison that traps the minds of overseas Chinese people as if they have never left China,” Yaqiu Wang, China researcher for Human Rights Watch, argued on Twitter. “It sucks everyone related to China into a black hole of censorship and surveillance.” —Mary Hui, Quartz reporter in Hong Kong
📋 Help build our next field guide
WeChat isn’t the first salvo in the brewing .com-flict between the US and China, and it won’t be the last. We’re starting to wrap our minds around a field guide to the splinternet—a new world order where “cyber sovereignty” carries more weight—and we want to know what you want to know. Here are some of our questions to get you started.
- What will happen?
- Why does it matter?
- Are there companies that will win big?
- Are there regions that will lose out?
How WeChat became China’s internet
A billion people use it and trillions in payments go through it every year, yet Weixin, as WeChat is known in China, isn’t even a decade old.
Launched by social media and gaming giant Tencent in 2011, the app made it easy for China’s booming legions of internet users to connect, at a time when millions of young people were moving away from rural villages to work in cities where they didn’t know anyone. Just a year after its launch, it had 100 million users, a milestone Facebook took four years to hit.
WeChat took an approach to the internet that squared well with the Communist Party’s desire for increasing control: creating a walled garden where users were more siloed, compared with the relatively free-wheeling “public square” that microblog Weibo represented. As internet speed improved, WeChat’s utility grew beyond chatting and following people—today you can use it to shop, check into hotels, and pay for pretty much anything. In 2020, the app has 1.2 billion users, perhaps 15% of them part of the Chinese diaspora.
For a year, WeChat had little in the way of social media competition—Alibaba’s platforms are focused on e-commerce and logistics—until ByteDance, TikTok’s parent, came along in 2012. ByteDance drew young users with its clickbait-y news app and other offerings, then swiftly set its sights overseas. In China, Tencent and ByteDance engaged in a bitter, often petty rivalry. But outside China, it was TikTok that drew attention as China’s first cross-over app.
Now the popularity of its foe is set to be an issue for Tencent, which is far more embedded in the US economy than ByteDance. Tencent owns Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends, and has a major stake in the developer of Fortnite, the top-earning video game last year, as well as a 5% holding in Tesla.
Though communication on WeChat has long been censored and surveilled, it’s unclear whether Trump would have paid much attention to the app on its own. It took the immense popularity of TikTok—the first Chinese app that US platforms really saw as competition—coupled with the specter of teenagers’ dance videos leaking personal data to Beijing, to draw the US president’s scrutiny.
A brief history of WeChatting
January 2011: Weixin, or “tiny letters,” becomes available for download in China. Tencent quickly adds photo, video, and voice features.
2012: WeChat makes it easier for users to follow companies and celebrities’ public accounts using personalized QR codes, which become ubiquitous.
January 2013: WeChat is spotted censoring the Chinese name of an investigative newspaper, including in messages from users outside China.
June 2013: India mulls a WeChat ban over national security concerns—but doesn’t follow through.
2014: WeChat revs up mobile payments, introduced the previous year, with red packets, a digital version of a cash-gifting custom popular across Asia to mark the lunar new year.
2017: China’s internet regulator investigates WeChat and other social platforms for allegedly spreading rumors and obscenity.
June 29, 2020: India bans 57 Chinese apps on national security grounds, including WeChat.
Aug. 6, 2020: The Trump administration issues an executive order banning transactions with WeChat and its parent Tencent, as well as TikTok and its parent ByteDance.
The WeChat panopticon
Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, has done extensive research into the Chinese government’s use of WeChat as a powerful surveillance tool. Here are some of their key findings:
🔎 Overseas users on non-China-registered WeChat accounts are subject to content surveillance, and documents and images gathered from them are used to train algorithms to improve the censorship of China-registered accounts.
🖼️ WeChat censors images, filtering them for sensitive text and also comparing them to blacklisted images. For example, images of the late Nobel peace prize-winning Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo were censored in private one-on-one chats in 2017.
👁️ The company can be overzealous in its censorship. Last year, even state media outlets had some of their posts censored.
Essential reading
- Spreading China’s influence: WeChat amplifies the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda worldwide, so much so that it has “smothered independent Chinese media outlets and community groups.”
- Facebook’s WeChat envy: Last year, Mark Zuckerberg outlined a vision for his social media company that sounded strikingly similar to Wechat.
- A long arm: Beijing uses WeChat to spy on and intimidate Uyghurs living outside of China
- Dig it up: Developed by the University of Hong Kong’s journalism and media studies school, WeChatScope tracks censored articles and makes them open-access.
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Thanks for reading! And best wishes for a connected end to your week,
Mary Hui
Reporter
Tripti Lahiri
Asia editor