The human cost of a WeChat ban: severing a hundred million ties | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/13/1006631/wechat-ban-severs-a-hundred-million-ties/?truid=a497ecb44646822921c70e7e051f7f1a
The US hurting itself
There’s a reason why WeChat is the only platform still available for communicating with people in China. It’s because the Chinese government banned everything else. First it was Facebook and Google, then Telegram and WhatsApp. “It’s not as if there’s no fault on the Chinese side for this,” Webster says.
But retaliating in turn is also not the solution. “If you think about what the US is doing, it’s basically learning from China,” says Youyou Zhou, a Chinese national who works as a journalist in the US and relies on WeChat to talk to sources and loved ones. “It’s establishing cyber sovereignty and claiming to protect user data in the US by using political action and legal means to fend off competition. It’s just not what you would expect a liberal and free country would do.”
Over time, both Webster and Zhou worry that this cleaving will hurt the US. What’s happening in China right now, Webster says, is “legitimately very dark,” including the escalating oppression of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the passage of the National Security Law in Hong Kong. But the Trump administration’s actions are against the US’s self-interests, he says. “If we set ourselves up for a new cold war and there’s no ability to monitor actual events in China, I think we could very well miss opportunities to have better outcomes in the long term. Essentially tearing down any connection between the two places is a recipe for enduring conflict.”
#WeChat #USA-Chine #Fin_du_global_internet #Culture_numérique