1/7/2024 0 Comments Wechat banWeChat users outside of China are increasingly finding themselves trapped in a mobile extension of the Great Firewall of China through which they’re subjected to surveillance, censorship and propaganda. The app has become the long arm of the Chinese regime, extending the PRC’s techno-authoritarian reach into the lives of its citizens and non-citizens in the diaspora. The Chinese ‘super-app’ WeChat, which is indispensable in China, has approximately 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide, including 100 million installations outside of China. Today, living as free citizens in the United States or Europe, they dare not speak freely or attend protests, because their speech or action might land their relatives back home in trouble.ĪSPI recently described the local problem: ![]() In Tibet, they defied the Chinese regime, risking imprisonment and torture. Among the newly silenced are former political prisoners. I know several Tibetans who, once they started using WeChat, slowly disappeared from the street protests and went silent on social media. But sometime between 20, as more and more Tibetans adopted WeChat to establish contact with their families in Tibet, they became susceptible to China’s long-distance relational repression, a coercive technique through which relatives are strategically harassed in the home country to silence a particular activist abroad. The demonstrations routinely drew hundreds, sometimes thousands, of exiled Tibetans. This platform powers the apparatus of transnational repression that Beijing employs to silence its exiled dissidents, intimidate overseas activists and surveil protesters.īetween 20, when I worked as a Tibet rights campaigner in New York, we held regular protests at the Chinese consulate. The app is a rope that binds the diaspora to a command center in Beijing. Nor is WeChat simply a “lifeline” for diaspora populations. This super app runs on a technology of tyranny that combines algorithms of surveillance, repression and distraction to depoliticize the individual and demobilize the collective. ![]() WeChat is not a bridge - it’s a closed system that keeps its 1.2 billion users in a parallel universe where they are free to interact as long as they don’t cross the lines. They ignore concerns about political liberty and human security that are central to the debate that has long surrounded this controversial app. But these metaphors obscure the app’s true nature. But unlike most actions this administration has taken over the past four years, the proposed ban on WeChat can be a net positive for human rights.Īpp bans in general belong to the censorship arsenal of illiberal regimes, but WeChat is one of a kind, and banning it might eventually strengthen the liberal world order.Ĭritics of the ban say WeChat is “China’s bridge to the world” and a “lifeline” for the Chinese diaspora. The Trump administration’s executive order to curb the use of the mobile app WeChat, which will be banned from app stores beginning Sunday, has become a flashpoint in the deepening standoff between China and the United States.
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