For people in the U.S, WeChat connects immigrants and students from China to their pasts and to each other
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.For millions of people in the U.S. who use the Chinese app WeChat, it’s a lifeline to friends, family, customers and business contacts in China.
In China, WeChat, or Weixin as it’s known, is critical infrastructure – texting, social media, cab-hailing, payments and more, all wrapped into one app. Many Chinese businesses don’t even take credit cards any more, just WeChat. It has over a billion users, owner Tencent says, mostly in China. Mobile app firms have varying estimates for U.S. downloads – in the range of 19 to 26 million.
Kurt Braybrook, who spent 22 years doing business in Shanghai before moving back to the U.S. in 2017, says the app is irreplaceable for him and his China-born wife. He could lose roughly 500 WeChat contacts, few of which he could reach without the app. The day after Trump’s order, Zhu got dozens of queries from friends, family members and colleagues, asking if they should switch to messaging options such as Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal. Those offer secure messaging and aren’t Chinese-owned.
WeChat users are censored by the government in China. It’s not quite the same for international users who registered their accounts outside China, but the Citizen Lab internet watchdog group in Toronto says WeChat monitors documents and images shared abroad to aid its censorship in China. WeChat’s parent, Tencent, said earlier this year that “all content shared among international users of WeChat is private.
If there’s some kind of ban on WeChat, it’s not clear what the agency will do instead – perhaps use other apps more if Chinese-Americans do that. “We haven’t really thought through what that looks like.”
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