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The Trump administration stated on Wednesday it was stepping up efforts to purge “untrusted” Chinese apps from US digital networks and referred to as the Chinese-owned short-video app TikTok and messenger app WeChat “significant threats.”
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated expanded US efforts on a program it calls “Clean Network” would give attention to 5 areas and embody steps to forestall numerous Chinese apps, in addition to Chinese telecoms corporations, from accessing delicate info on American residents and companies.
Pompeo’s announcement comes after US President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok. The massively in style video-sharing app has come below hearth from US lawmakers and the administration over nationwide safety issues, amid intensified tensions between Washington and Beijing.
“With parent companies based in China, apps like TikTok, WeChat, and others are significant threats to personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for CCP (Chinese Communist Party) content censorship,” Pompeo stated.
In an interview with state information company Xinhua on Wednesday, Chinese overseas minister Wang Yi stated the United States “has no right” to arrange the “Clean Network” and calls the actions by Washington as “a textbook case of bullying”.
“Anyone can see through clearly that the intention of the US is to protect it’s monopoly position in technology and to rob other countries of their proper right to development,” stated Wang.
TikTok at present faces a deadline of September 15 to both promote its US operations to Microsoft or face an outright ban.
In the run-up to Trump’s November re-election bid, US-China ties are on the lowest ebb in a long time. Relations are strained over the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, China’s navy buildup within the South China Sea, its growing management over Hong Kong, and therapy of Uighur Muslims, in addition to Beijing’s huge commerce surpluses and technological rivalry.
Pompeo stated the United States was working to forestall Chinese telecoms agency Huawei Technologies from pre-installing or making accessible for obtain the most well-liked US apps on its telephones.
“We don’t want companies to be complicit in Huawei’s human rights abuses, or the CCP’s surveillance apparatus,” Pompeo stated, with out mentioning any particular US corporations.
Pompeo stated the State Department would work with different authorities businesses to shield the information of US residents and American mental property, together with COVID-19 vaccine analysis, by stopping entry from cloud-based methods run by corporations comparable to Alibaba, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom, and Tencent.
Pompeo stated he was becoming a member of Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf in urging the US telecoms regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, to terminate authorisations for China Telecom and three different corporations to present companies to and from the United States.
He stated the State Department was additionally working to guarantee China couldn’t compromise info carried by undersea cables that join the United States to the worldwide Internet.
The United States has lengthy been lobbying European and different allies to persuade them to reduce out Huawei from their telecommunications networks. Huawei denies it spies for China and says the United States needs to frustrate its progress as a result of no US firm provides the identical expertise at a aggressive value.
Pompeo’s feedback on Wednesday mirrored a wider and extra accelerated push by Washington to restrict the entry of Chinese expertise corporations to US market and customers and, as one US official put it, to push again towards a “massive campaign to steal and weaponise our data against us.”
A State Department assertion stated momentum for the Clean Network program was rising and greater than 30 nations and territories have been now “Clean Countries” and lots of the world’s largest telecommunications corporations “Clean Telcos.”
It referred to as on US allies “to join the growing tide to secure our data from the CCP’s surveillance state and other malign entities.”
Huawei Technologies and Tencent declined to remark. Alibaba, Apple, China Telecom, China Mobile, and Baidu didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
© Thomson Reuters 2020
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