WASHINGTON – President Trump signed an executive order banning transactions with eight applications connected to China, including the Alipay payment platform owned by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co.
The order also prohibits transactions with the WeChat Pay app, owned by Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., along with six other apps.
The order, which was signed on Tuesday, goes into effect in 45 days after Trump leaves office. He instructs Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to evaluate other applications that may pose a threat to national security and asks the Secretary of Commerce, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to issue a report with recommendations to avoid transferring US user data for foreign opponents.
Trump, in the request, said that apps can access their users’ private information. That information could be used by the Chinese government to “track the location of federal and contract employees and build personal information files,” said Trump.
Alipay, a payment and lifestyle app with more than 1 billion users, is owned by Ant Group, the Chinese financial technology giant controlled by Ma. An Ant representative did not immediately comment. A WeChat representative also did not immediately comment.
The new move comes after the Trump administration issued two executive orders in August aimed at imposing new limits on Chinese social media applications TikTok and WeChat, citing national security concerns. Both orders faced legal challenges.
The order to ban Tencent’s WeChat downloads was blocked by a federal judge in September, just before it went into effect.
The Trump administration tried to overturn the decision. WeChat is a competitor of Alipay.
American companies doing business with China have raised concerns about the potential scope of the WeChat executive order, arguing that this could make them less competitive there. American companies may raise similar concerns about the new order.
Two federal judges also separately blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban from taking effect. The ban would have restricted US companies from transacting with TikTok, including hosting company data and delivering company content, which would essentially render the application inoperable in the U.S.
In issuing its executive order requesting that TikTok be effectively closed or sold to a US company, the government said it feared that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd., could share information about US users with the Chinese government, which the company said it never does.
The Trump administration has also sought to restrict Chinese telecommunications companies, such as Huawei Technologies Co., through executive orders. These actions were aimed at protecting US networks, but they also appeared to undermine the competitiveness of Chinese companies around the world when the next generation 5G wireless service became available.
Write to Andrew Restuccia at [email protected] and John D. McKinnon at [email protected]
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