WeChat: The next battle in the U.S.-China trade war

"It's hard to overemphasize the prominence of WeChat in China"

WeChat.
(Image credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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The Trump administration last week intensified its "campaign to claw apart the Chinese and American tech worlds," said Scott Rosenberg and Kyle Daly at Axios. After a series of attacks on the Chinese-owned video network TikTok, President Trump signed executive orders that would ban U.S. companies from doing business with not just TikTok but also WeChat, an app central to daily life in China. With American tech platforms largely blocked from China, a ban on WeChat would be a "major disruption" hampering commerce in China and cutting links to the "Chinese diaspora" around the world. The U.S. "has piled one anti-China initiative on top of another," said Bob Davis at The Wall Street Journal. China has been cautious in retaliation, aside from some rhetoric about "red lines," but we may be poised for a major escalation in the trade war. While so far China has said it will stick with the trade accord signed in December, Trump appears to be having second thoughts, saying "I don't feel the same about the deal."

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