WeChat, China’s mobile App that combines communication, social networking, and mobile payments, has been widely criticized in China and abroad for being arbitrarily manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party authorities, and has been the subject of efforts by the U.S. Trump administration to ban it on the grounds of protecting national security. As the U.S. administration and WeChat users in the U.S. continue to fight the administration’s legal battle to ban WeChat, there is ongoing concern about the enormous risks to individual freedoms and society, as well as to the international community, posed by the monopoly WeChat enjoys with the support of the Chinese Communist Party authorities.
Pending and Clear
On December 23, 2020, the Trump administration asked the San Francisco-based District Court of Northern California to reject a legal challenge by WeChat users in the United States to an executive order that President Trump announced in August restricting the use of WeChat within the United States. Following President Trump’s order to restrict the WeChat app on the grounds that the Chinese government’s ability to access user data through WeChat threatened U.S. national security, WeChat users in the United States filed a legal challenge to the executive order on the grounds that it infringed on their freedom of expression and freedom of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. courts blocked enforcement of the executive order.
Does President Trump’s executive order violate the U.S. Constitution by limiting and effectively banning the use of WeChat in the United States? In a situation where constitutionally guaranteed fundamental freedoms and national security conflict, how should the pros and cons be weighed so that the United States can maximize the protection of fundamental freedoms and national security? Does the President of the United States have the authority to issue such restrictions/prohibitions on national security grounds? These questions are currently unresolved in the United States, pending further hearings, hearings and decisions by U.S. courts. The relevant court has scheduled a hearing on this issue for January 2021.
Meanwhile, the widespread use of WeChat in China coupled with the lack of laws and regulations to protect citizens’ privacy rights has brought increasing attention to the risks and dangers faced by Chinese citizens.
Chinese lawmaker Pu Zhiqiang said that the personal privacy of Chinese citizens has been exposed on an unprecedented scale with the epidemic. Nowadays, you have to show your health code to travel by car, to enter any authority, to enter or leave a residential building, and in many places, you have to have face recognition. Although there is a public security necessity, is it necessary to expand to such a pervasive extent, and what is the private information of citizens that must be obtained, there seems to be no laws and regulations to follow in this regard, and it seems that anyone can come and check you.
In Pu’s view, a particularly glaring problem or risk with WeChat or the Internet in China is that the rule of law in China is not robust, and crimes for speech happen all the time. He said, “There are a lot of people on WeChat or the Internet who speak about certain topics that seem to be relatively sensitive at a certain point in time, or criticize certain indecent measures by certain staff members of a local government, and they could face criminal charges or end up being found guilty. This has all happened.”
Pu also said that in a modern country governed by the rule of law, there would be no such thing as sensitivity. It is enough to judge a person’s words and actions by their legality or illegality; the so-called sensitivity is a broad and vague concept or standard that can be arbitrarily manipulated by the authorities.
Teng Biao, a Chinese legal scholar and adjunct professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said it has become increasingly clear that the kind of high-tech totalitarianism promoted by the Chinese Communist Party authorities goes beyond the kind of pervasive Big Brother control over society at large depicted by British author George Orwell in his famous book “1984. Under the current one-party dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party, citizens have almost no privacy to speak of, a situation that is extremely harmful to society.
WeChat has become an important part of the high-tech surveillance system because the vast majority of Chinese Internet users, or almost all of them, have WeChat and rely on it to a large extent. Such comprehensive surveillance makes the dissemination of civil liberal ideas, especially the organization and contact of civil social movements, increasingly difficult and almost impossible,” Teng Biao said. “
WeChat Users’ Experiences
From the first day of WeChat’s existence, there has been much concern that WeChat could become a tool for the Chinese Communist authorities to monitor and exploit users’ personal information in ways that go beyond the law. This concern has grown stronger as time has passed.
According to Chinese lawmaker Xie Yangyi, “In a sentence or two it means that all your privacy, including your property, including your personal private life, all your whereabouts, even all your behavioral habits, all your personal information communications are under the so-called WeChat surveillance.”
Xie Yan Yi further explained that this comprehensive personal privacy exposure is the same as exposing yourself to others completely undefended, these personal privacy information also exposes your personality weaknesses, this situation means a major risk, means from property to security, to your personal dignity are exposed to risk, danger, means that your fate, your everything is in the hands of others. What those who control your personal information will do with such information is anyone’s guess, and the consequences are unthinkable and unimaginable.
The Wall Street Journal published a story on Dec. 22 with the headline, “WeChat Becomes a Powerful, Ubiquitous Surveillance Tool in China. The report noted that Chinese Communist authorities could use WeChat to monitor users’ whereabouts and speech and impose punishments on them, including arbitrary cancellation of their numbers, resulting in damage to their reputation because their circle of friends would assume that they were a troubled person.
But in Xie Yan Yi’s view, the damage caused by WeChat’s practice of pinning users at every turn goes far beyond that. He said: “Both individually and socially, it is far more harmful than we can imagine. We can simply say. In terms of individuals, your presence in WeChat in an information-based social environment is equivalent to your life, your electronic life, your virtual life. Almost all of your so-called social life, your work, your family, including family life, your interaction with individuals and groups are on this. This also includes, as we said earlier, your property, your finances, your spending, your travel, your speech, your calls for help, your security. That certainly includes your reputation.”
Xie Yanyi went on to further illustrate with his personal experience. He said, “For example, my own WeChat has been illegally blocked, banned, and deleted more than once, twice, ten times, or even hundreds of times. I don’t know how many micro-signals I’ve had since qq (another instant messaging software from Tencent, the company that launched WeChat). This is tantamount to it sentencing you to death. You’re a modern person, you’re in information conditions, and we just said that WeChat has such a function that it’s tantamount to a destruction, a ruin for you.”
From the perspective of the free flow of information for social development and the well-being of society at large, Xie Yangyi believes that WeChat, which is dominant in China and difficult to see alternatives in the foreseeable future, has done more harm to society as a whole by wantonly blocking users’ and society at large’s right to speak and block their access to information.
Xie Yanyi said: “Freedom of expression and access to information can be said to be the first right, the first freedom. If we do a good job in this area, especially in the public sphere of openness and transparency, in avoiding natural and man-made disasters, in promoting the virtuous circle and development of society, it is of great benefit. On the contrary, if the right of access to information is arbitrarily usurped and emasculated, the damage to society is catastrophic and can be said to be a catastrophe that will never end.”
Xie Yanyi’s claim here that the free flow of information is essential to avoid natural and man-made disasters clearly echoes the views of Nobel Prize-winning economist and Indian-born economist Amartya Sen.
Amartya Sen says, “An important fact of human famine history is that no great famine has ever occurred in a country with a democratic government and freedom of publication. Famines have occurred in ancient kingdoms, in contemporary authoritarian societies, in primitive tribes, in modern technocratic dictatorships, in colonial economies under imperialism, and in newly independent countries under authoritarian rule or one-party dictatorships. But none of those countries that are independent, that have regular elections, that have an opposition party to raise a critical voice, that allow newspapers to report freely and to question the correctness of government decisions, and that do not impose censorship on the publication of books and newspapers, have ever had a famine.”
Many scholars in China have also pointed out that one of the necessary conditions for the man-made famine that killed millions and millions of people in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the lack of freedom of speech and publication and the blocking of access to information, and that the total control of the media by the CCP authorities allowed the CCP regime, led by Mao Zedong, to go uncriticized, to do whatever it wanted, to do whatever it wanted, and that the starving people simply died silently.
Communist Information Manipulation Scourge the World
The Chinese Communist regime’s control over domestic public opinion and the exchange of information among the people is usually considered by other countries as a Chinese characteristic, an internal affair of China, which, although regrettable, has no direct stake in the international community. However, as economic globalization progresses, the direct impact of the CCP’s practice of public opinion and information manipulation on the international community has come to the fore in the form of a global catastrophe, the new coronavirus pandemic, whose end is still difficult to see.
The new coronavirus outbreak is now spreading to all continents, including Antarctica. A daily global outbreak update released by Johns Hopkins University says that as of noon EST on New Year’s Day 2021, there were nearly 83,720,000 confirmed cases of infection worldwide and nearly 183,000 deaths from the outbreak.
Since the outbreak, the fairness and effectiveness of the world’s separate responses have been the subject of controversy, but many countries agree that the Communist Party’s information blackout has led what should have been a local public health crisis in China to become a worldwide catastrophe. Many countries, including China’s ally Iran, have publicly blamed the Communist authorities for blocking information at the beginning of the outbreak, which led to thousands of Chinese being uninformed and traumatized, and for trying to downplay the outbreak after it became too much of a cover-up, even to the point of fiercely attacking the United States for restricting air traffic with China. A spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Health has publicly complained several times that the Chinese authorities have played a painful prank on the world by doing so.
WeChat and its pervasive surveillance of private information played a prominent role in the cover-up that led to the explosion of the new coronavirus outbreak from Wuhan to China and around the world. Last December, Wuhan physician Li Wenliang shared information about the rapidly developing outbreak with seven other physician friends in his private WeChat circle of friends and reminded them to keep themselves and their families safe.
Li Wenliang and his doctor colleagues were admonished by the Communist Party’s public security authorities for spreading rumors about the outbreak. China Central Television (CCTV), which is under the control of the CCP, repeatedly broadcast on New Year’s Day 2020 the alleged news that eight people had been summoned for spreading rumors about the epidemic. The CCP’s information blackout and public opinion guidance, supplemented by the stick of the public security authorities, was so successful that no Chinese medical personnel dared to talk about the epidemic after China’s CCTV repeatedly broadcast the alleged news of eight people being summoned for spreading rumors about the epidemic with great fanfare.
The epidemic in China took advantage of the CCP’s information blockade, public opinion guidance and threat of violence to gain momentum, culminating in a major outbreak that eventually forced the CCP authorities to impose a city closure on a scale unprecedented in human history. Li Wenliang then died of the epidemic, or rumors as the Chinese Communist Party officially called them, and the epidemic in China spread to the rest of the world at the same time.
The Entanglement of WeChat and U.S. Politics
In August 2020, President Trump issued an executive order to restrict or even ban the WeChat application in the United States, citing national security as the reason. WeChat is thus officially entangled with U.S. politics. The ongoing dispute is pending a decision by the U.S. courts.
In the meantime, as the controversy over whether there was massive fraud in the U.S. presidential election has unfolded and continued since its conclusion, WeChat’s entanglement with U.S. politics has taken on a new dimension, as evidenced by the prevalence of various conspiracy theories about the election on WeChat and rumors of massive fraud in the election, despite denials by U.S. courts at all levels and the U.S. Attorney General Barr of claims of massive election fraud.
To date, dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump and his team in various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, regarding massive fraud in the presidential election have been dismissed. The court dismissed those lawsuits mainly on the grounds that the lawsuit plaintiffs failed to produce convincing evidence.
In this case, a seemingly ironic statement was circulated on Twitter: “None of the alleged election fraud has been recognized by the courts. The reason for this is that Trump (Trump) and his team of lawyers do not know Chinese, and they have not seen a single piece of evidence of election fraud that has been piled up on WeChat. It’s a shame to think that the regime was just subverted.”
The Future of WeChat’s Monopoly Status
Despite the fact that WeChat’s shortcomings and even its bad practices have been obvious for a long time, Teng Biao believes that the monopoly position that WeChat has acquired under the Communist Party’s one-party dictatorship will not change significantly in the foreseeable future. He said WeChat has a wide range of applications, both as an information distribution platform and an online payment platform, and now it has added a health code application; even though users can switch to other platforms for their communications, WeChat’s online payment and other functions cannot be transferred to other families; as far as Chinese users in the United States are concerned, they can give up WeChat, but their relatives at home and the elderly cannot because they do not know how to use anything else.
Xie Yanyi, a Chinese lawmaker, said that WeChat will be difficult to replace in the short term, but in the long run it will die because of its monopoly and unbridled evil, just like a dictatorship. Xie Yan Yi added that he was not referring to any particular regime or country, but to the general laws of human history. He cited Baidu as a good example in this regard. Although it started not too late compared to Google and was once very prosperous, it used its monopoly position to sell fake drugs and advertisements, bringing itself into disrepute.
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