WASHINGTON – President Trump signed an executive order banning transactions with eight connected applications in China, including the Alipay payment platform owned by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co.
The order also bans transactions with the WeChat Pay app owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., along with six other apps.
The order, which was signed Tuesday, will take effect in 45 days, after Trump leaves office. Instructs Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to assess other applications that may pose a threat to national security and calls on the Secretary of Commerce, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to issue a report with recommendations to prevent transfer of data from US users to foreign adversaries.
Trump, according to the order, said the apps can access private information of its users. This information could be used by the Chinese government to “track the location of federal employees and contractors and create personal information files,” Trump said.
Alipay, a payment and lifestyle app with more than 1 billion users, is owned by Ant Group, the Chinese financial technology giant controlled by Mr. Ma. An Ant representative made no immediate comments. A WeChat representative also did not comment immediately.
The new step comes after the Trump administration issued a couple of executive orders in August to impose new limits on Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat, which mentioned national security concerns. Both orders have faced legal challenges.
The order banning Tencent’s WeChat downloads was blocked by a federal judge in September shortly before it went into effect.
The Trump administration has tried to overturn the sentence. WeChat is a competitor of Alipay.
U.S. companies doing business with China raised concerns about the potential scope of WeChat’s executive order, arguing it could make them less competitive. U.S. companies may raise similar concerns about the new order.
Two federal judges also separately blocked the Trump administration’s ban on TikTok. The ban would have restricted U.S. companies from transacting with TikTok, including hosting company data and delivering company content, which would have essentially made the application inoperable in the United States.
In issuing its executive order calling for TikTok to be effectively shut down or sold to a U.S. company, the administration said it feared that Chinese parent company TikTok ByteDance Ltd. could share information about U.S. users with the Chinese government, which the company said it would never do.
The Trump administration has also tried to restrict Chinese-based telecommunications companies, such as Huawei Technologies Co., through executive orders. These actions were aimed at securing US networks, but they also seemed to undermine the competitiveness of Chinese companies around the world when the next-generation 5G wireless service begins to be made available.
Write to Andrew Restuccia to [email protected] and John D. McKinnon to [email protected]
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