Trump bans Chinese payment apps, including AliPay and WeChat Pay

Published at: Jan. 6, 2021

With just two weeks left in office, President Donald Trump has sent out a new executive order targeting Chinese payment apps. 

The Tuesday order bars United States citizens or people located in the U.S. from using nine Chinese payment apps. It continues the White House's earlier efforts to cut off the U.S. market from Chinese-owned apps like TikTok. Yesterday's order repeats earlier concerns of data collection by the Chinese Communist Party:

"The continuing activity of the PRC and the CCP to steal or otherwise obtain United States persons’ data makes clear that there is an intent to use bulk data collection to advance China’s economic and national security agenda."

The apps targeted are AliPay, CamScanner, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, WeChat Pay and WPS Office. The executive order takes effect in 45 days, by which time Trump will already be out of office. Given that his earlier order to get ByteDance to divest from TikTok was stonewalled in court while he was still in office, there's not a ton of reason to believe that Trump will get his way here. 

As of publication time, Biden's transition team had not responded to Cointelegraph's request for comment as to whether the new administration plans to see Trump's order through. 

The focus on payment apps is particularly significant. Recent moves from the U.S. national security apparatus have definitely indicated concern over China's payments systems, particularly a central bank digital currency with a database accessible by the CCP.

Many in crypto as well as the broader tech industry have warned of a cold war in technology between China and the U.S., including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and several leaders of Ripple Labs. While the situation between the two countries is obviously tense, both Facebook and Ripple were seeing serious investigations by U.S. regulators concerned about their operations when they made those arguments, somewhat deflating the effect of their patriotism. 

While the barriers between the private and public sectors are murkier, China's treatment of the private companies that Trump is targeting is already pretty bad. Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba that owns AliPay, recently fell afoul of the Chinese government. Xi Jinping is said to have personally put the clampdown on Ant Group's aborted initial public offering, since which time Alibaba's stock has slipped and the founder of both, Jack Ma, has disappeared. 

Another giant of Chinese tech, Tencent, owns three of the entities targeted by Trump's order: QQ Wallet, Tencent QQ and WeChat Pay. While Tencent has avoided Ant Group's high-profile brushes with the CCP, China's much-anticipated central bank digital currency may well be an effort to muscle in on the business of the country's impressive fintech sector. 

Tags
Regulation
China
Payments
Privacy
Alibaba
Cbdc
Donald Trump
Mobile Payments
Jack Ma
Related Posts
China’s central bank worried about stablecoins’ risk to financial systems
The Chinese central bank is “quite worried” about the global financial risks associated with digital currencies, particularly stablecoins, according to a senior official. Fan Yifei, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), expressed concerns over the reportedly serious threat stablecoins, such as Tether (USDT), pose to global financial and settlement systems, CNBC reported on Thursday. The official emphasized that the speed of development in private payments systems is “very alarming,” and the PBoC is working against monopolies and the “disorderly expansion of capital,” adding: “Some commercial organizations’ so-called stablecoins, especially global stablecoins, may bring risks and challenges …
Bitcoin / July 8, 2021
China’s CBDC is about domestic dominance, not beating the dollar
For the past several years, the trade war between China and the U.S. has been at the center of international relations, with technology playing an outsized role. Within crypto, advancing interest in central bank digital currencies has become part of that narrative of geopolitical competition. Many have framed the development of CBDCs in China and the U.S. as a race — in which case, China is clearly closer to launch and, hence, the “winner.” But a race to the finish is a flawed paradigm, and one to which Cointelegraph has contributed its fair share. For the moment, China is actively …
Regulation / Feb. 26, 2021
US Fed researcher says CBDCs should beat Big Tech payments on privacy protection
Cash use has lost a ton of ground to digital payments as the pandemic has changed the way people transact worldwide. Some experts have recently argued that central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, could solve the problem of leaving that payments data in the hands of major tech platforms. In a blog post published Monday morning, Federal Reserve of New York researcher Michael Lee and University of California Santa Barbara economics professor Rod Garratt expounded on a paper they released earlier this month. The authors point to tech firms' troubling use of consumer data, which has landed everyone from Visa …
Regulation / Nov. 23, 2020
China’s Digital Yuan to Reportedly Target Dominance of Alibaba and Tencent
The People’s Bank of China is purportedly planning to use its digital currency electronic system (DCEP) — another moniker for its central bank digital currency — to target the dominance of technology giants like Alibaba and Tencent in the digital payments sector. The report comes only a few days after claims of the central bank prompting a top antitrust agency to launch a probe against Alipay and WeChat Pay for using their dominance to suppress competition. According to the Financial Times, even regulators and executives of Alibaba’s financial group Ant agreed that PBoC will target the market dominance of Alipay …
Regulation / Aug. 4, 2020
China’s digital yuan will offer best privacy protection, says official
Chinese authorities are willing to ensure maximum user privacy for the country’s central bank digital currency, or CBDC, according to an official at the People’s Bank of China. Mu Changchun, head of the People’s Bank of China’s digital currency research institute, spoke of China’s digital yuan privacy capabilities at the 2021 China Development Forum on Sunday, local news agency Sina Finance reported. Mu stated that a completely anonymous CBDC “is not feasible” because a national digital currency must meet requirements related to Anti-Money Laundering, Counter-Terrorist Financing and anti-tax evasion. However, that doesn’t mean that China’s digital yuan lacks user privacy, …
Technology / March 22, 2021