WASHINGTON – President Trump has 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 application owned by Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., along with six other applications.
The order, which was signed on Tuesday, goes into effect 45 days after Mr. Trump leaves office. It instructs Trade Secretary Wilbur Ross to assess other applications that could 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 data transfer. to US users to foreign opponents.
Mr. Trump, in order, said that the applications can access private information from their users. This information could be used by the Chinese government to “track the locations of federal employees and contractors and create personal information files,” Trump said.
Alipay, a payment and lifestyle app with over 1 billion users, is owned by Ant Group, the Chinese financial technology giant controlled by Mr. Ma. An Ant representative had no immediate comment. A WeChat representative had no immediate comment.
The new move comes after the Trump administration issued a pair of executive orders in August to impose new limits on Chinese social media applications TikTok and WeChat, citing national security concerns. Both orders faced legal challenges.
Tencent’s ban on downloading WeChat was blocked by a federal judge in September, shortly before it was scheduled to take effect.
The Trump administration has tried to overturn the decision. WeChat is a competitor of Alipay.
US companies doing business with China have expressed concern about the potential scope of the WeChat executive order, arguing that it could make them less competitive there. US companies could raise similar concerns about the new order.
Two federal judges also separately blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban on coming into force. The ban would have restricted US companies from transacting with TikTok, including hosting company data and delivering company content, which would have made the application essentially inoperable in the US.
By issuing the executive order by which TikTok was effectively shut down or sold to a US company, the administration said it feared that Chinese parent company TikTok ByteDance Ltd. could share information about US users with the Chinese government, which the company said that he won’t do.
The Trump administration has also tried to restrict Chinese telecommunications companies, such as Huawei Technologies Co., by executive orders. These actions were aimed at securing US networks, but also seemed to undermine the competitiveness of Chinese companies around the world as the next-generation 5G wireless service begins to be available.
Write to Andrew Restuccia to [email protected] and John D. McKinnon to [email protected]
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