With just two weeks to go before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning transactions with eight Chinese apps and their developers.
The move hits Alipay, the payment platform and sister company of Alibaba owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Ant Group, whose Jack Ma currently lying low after clashing with regulators in Beijing.
It also prohibits, for security reasons, transactions with ‘persons developing or controlling seven other programs’, which include WeChat, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, CamScanner, Tencent QQ, VMate and WPS Office.
The president made the order with two weeks in office
Although the ban underscores the Trump administration’s China strategy, it will not take effect for 45 days, which means that the Biden administration will be responsible for defining and enforcing the scope of the prohibition.
It is not yet clear how the Biden government plans to proceed with this order or about the general approach of Mr. Trump does not China.
A British government member who spoke to Sky News Huawei said the UK believes there is dual support in the US for measures approved by China.
Mr Trump accuses China of using ‘bulk data collection’ to advance its national security agenda, and claims that the apps and companies it targeted with the order are banned because it endangers Americans.
U.S. officials have accused China of using data stolen in several hacks, most importantly, for the Office of Personnel Management – which contains the records of all federal government employees – to compile files.
“The United States has evaluated that a number of software applications associated with Chinese automatically record large amounts of information from millions of users in the United States, including sensitive personally identifiable information and private information,” the order reads.
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This follows an applauding three-part series on Chinese espionage, published in Foreign Policy magazine, which concluded in December last year, in which US officials reported that Chinese companies had been alleged called in to process stolen data for China’s spy agencies.
Similar actions by the Trump administration on the social media app TikTok and the telecommunications company Huawei achieved mixed results.
Despite the order that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, must close or sell its US assets, lawsuits delayed it order is implemented.
However, US sanctions against Huawei are successful the United Kingdom re-evaluates whether the company’s equipment can be safely integrated into Britain’s 5G infrastructure.
After the government initially gave the green light to provide radio equipment, the government took a turn and banned mobile networks from purchasing new Huawei equipment, while also requiring all the equipment they currently use, within the next six years.