We Don't Chat — For Now

 

Today (Sunday, Sept. 20) the U. S. Department of Commerce implemented an unprecedented ban on a major Chinese social media company, WeChat.  Citing security concerns, President Trump issued an executive order on Aug. 6 to cripple WeChat and TikTok, but the TikTok order has been delayed until November.

 

Not so WeChat.  While it will not be illegal for individuals to continue using WeChat in the U. S., it may become difficult or impossible in the days to come. 

 

The Dept. of Commerce order bans the distribution of the WeChat app to new phones and prohibits the transfer of funds through the app.  It also prohibits internet service providers from servicing the app, and so unless your ISP is based outside the U. S., the app may disappear altogether.  Some of the terms of the ban are rather technical, but I think a word from the underworld covers the intent of the order:  they want to kneecap WeChat. 

 

Anyone who knows a person who speaks Chinese has probably heard them at least mention WeChat.  It's operated by the huge Chinese Google-like conglomerate Tencent, and is sort of like Facebook on steroids.  In addition to allowing Facebook-like interactions, it serves as a money transfer medium, a news app, messaging app, and of course, an advertising medium.  According to a report in the Washington Post, the Chinese government censors it heavily, and independent investigators who tested it with 26,000 test words on accounts registered in China, Canada, and the U. S. found nearly 200 words triggered censorship in accounts with Chinese phone numbers.  Over three million people use WeChat in the U. S., and the majority of them are going to have big problems trying to continue with the app after today.

 

Why is the U. S. government landing on WeChat like a piano from a third-floor window?  The official announcement is terse on this:  "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S. Today’s announced prohibitions, when combined, protect users in the U.S. by eliminating access to these applications and significantly reducing their functionality."  Personally, my impression of what WeChat does is to connect Chinese speakers in the U. S. with their friends, relatives, associates, and (possibly) fellow spies back in China.  But because the vast majority of what goes on through WeChat is probably in Chinese, it's hard to see how the rest of the U. S. is directly harmed by the existence of the app.

 

What this looks like to me is more along the lines of a diplomatic tit-for-tat on a large scale.  Every so often the U. S. will catch some spies from another country and expel them.  It's entirely expected that in the days to follow, the foreign country will go to the U. S. embassy there and tell an equal number of U. S. diplomats or diplomatic staff to pack their bags and head back to the U. S. 

 

Ever since Facebook, Twitter, and company gained prominence, these U. S.-based apps have been heavily censored or flat-out banned in China, which is one reason why there was such a big vacuum for WeChat to fill.  In going a long way toward banning WeChat here, the U. S. government is simply saying, "You want to ban our apps?  Okay, we'll ban yours and see how you like that." 

 

Such moves have their place in a carefully planned strategic pressure-building exercise that includes sanctions of other kinds.  But this administration's actions toward China do not exactly give the impression of careful deliberation.  Nevertheless, being startling and unpredictable can itself be an effective strategy, and it's possible that WeChat and even the Chinese Communist Party itself was caught off guard.

 

The broader picture of U. S.-China relations, while not explicitly a matter of engineering ethics, deserves mention at this point.  While allowing economic freedom to a great extent, the Chinese government continues to repress political freedom and systematically persecutes certain groups such as the Falun Gong religious organization and the ethnic group termed Uighurs.  These are deplorable actions that deserve censure, and if the WeChat ban is a sort of punishment for these things, it is well deserved. 

 

On the other hand, one has to ask how effective it will be.  Something else not called WeChat but doing everything WeChat does is probably in development at this instant, and the Department of Commerce order hinted that they might take care of that too, if WeChat shows up under another name.  What this action has started is a social-media-ban war that will be marked by a ban followed by an evasive move, then followed by another ban, and so on.  The WeChat users, most of whom probably do nothing more sinister than checking on Aunt Hong in Wuhan every now and then, are caught in the middle, and will have to struggle along as best they can with old-fashioned phone calls or whatever ingenious programmers and companies can come up with to evade the ban. 

 

And there is always the possibility that, as the clock runs down to Election Day, this anti-China move will turn out to be just a political plum offered to supporters of the President, rather than a calculated diplomatic move in a well-crafted chess game.  I don't know how many Chinese-American citizens voted for President Trump in 2016, but this action probably has not endeared him to them. 

 

Historically, one reason the WorldWideWeb has appealed philosophically to certain tendencies of mind is that it does not recognize borders.  For people whose ideal world would be a borderless global block party under a single benevolent government, that has been one of the strengths of the Internet-mediated thing that lets people chat with others halfway around the world as though they were in the same room.  But the Department of Commerce move is an attempt to impose borders on what began as a borderless cyberworld.  Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply a political stunt that will soon be forgotten is something we can't tell yet.  All we can be sure of is that U. S. users of WeChat are going to have a hard time continuing to use it, and we'll just have to wait to see what the wider effects are, if any.

 

Sources:  The official U. S. Department of Commerce statement regarding its orders on WeChat and TikTok can be found at https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerce-department-prohibits-wechat-and-tiktok-transactions-protect.  I also referred to a Washington Post article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/18/wechat-ban-faq/.

China's High-Tech Persecution of Uighurs

In 1949, the newly formed communist government of China seized control of the northwest corner of the country now known as Xinjiang Province.  The province was home to a number of different ethnic groups, the largest of which are known as Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs).  The Uighurs are a Turkic people with their own language and culture, and the majority of them are Muslims.  None of this sits well with the Chinese government, which began systematic attempts to convert Uighurs to conform to the language and ways of the Chinese-majority Han ethnicity, and the struggle continues to this day. 

Chilling details of how Beijing is using the latest high-tech surveillance methods to persecute Uighurs were reported in a recent article that appeared on the website of Wired.  In 2011, a new social-media app called WeChat took China by storm, and Uighurs seized upon it as a great new way to communicate among themselves, discussing everything from personal matters to politics and religion.  But in 2014, the Chinese government forced WeChat's owners to let them snoop on all WeChat messages, and soon after that, bad things started to happen to Uighurs who discussed sensitive issues such as Islam or Uighur separatist movements on WeChat.  In 2016, Uighur families who used WeChat incautiously were being checked on by police officers, sometimes daily.  For one family, it got so bad that they decided to emigrate to Turkey, and the father sent his wife and children ahead while he stayed behind to wait for his passport.  It never arrived, and instead he was arrested.

This is just one of thousands of cases in which Chinese officials have persecuted Uighurs.  Besides monitoring social media, the police are requiring Uighurs to provide voice and facial-recognition samples and even taking compulsory DNA samples.  Families are afraid to turn their lights on at home before dawn for fear the police will figure that they're praying, and haul them off to a re-education camp.  Yes, China is operating what amounts to massive prison camps for Uighurs, which the government claims are vocational training centers.  A diplomatic spokesman for Turkey contradicts these claims, saying that up to a million Uighurs have been detained in such camps against their will and subjected to torture and "political brainwashing."

Such actions are familiar to anyone with knowledge of China's Great Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 until Mao Zedong's death in 1976.  This nationwide convulsion paralyzed the country, led to millions of deaths, and subjected millions more to internal exile and forced self-confessions.  While such things are a fading memory to most citizens of China today, the surveillance state is not, and all it takes for someone to fall back into those bad old days is to manifest religious faith in actions such as gathering for worship or praying openly.  And political organizing against the will of the ruling government will land you in hot water too.

China's reach even extends beyond its borders to blight the lives of Uighurs who escape to Turkey and elsewhere.  For Uighurs remaining in China, even contacting an exiled Uighur relative or friend by phone can result in police investigations and arrest.  So leaving China usually means losing all contact with family and friends who remain behind, except for the rare hand-carried letter that can be smuggled back into the country by a friendly courier. 

The Chinese government seems to be motivated by fear rather than trust.  One reason for this may be that the long history of China is that of periods of peace enforced by central control, interrupted by brief spasms of popular revolt that depose the old guard and install a new one in its place.  The leaders of China seem above all determined not to let that happen to them, which explains their brutal response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and their continued harrassment of ethnic and religious minorities.  In common with other totalitarian philosophies, they seem to think that if anybody, anywhere in China harbors thoughts or actions that fundamentally contradict the basic assumptions of dialectical materialism, the regime is in mortal danger and must suppress such thoughts or actions.   

In a well-informed article in the journal of religion and public life First Things, Thomas F. Farr, who heads an NGO called the Religious Freedom Institute, says that U. S. diplomacy toward China has been largely ineffective in its efforts to mitigate the suffering that religious and ethnic minorities endure there.  Farr recommends reminding Chinese government leaders of their self-interest in promoting a peaceful and prosperous society.  He suggests that we provide Chinese leaders with hard evidence that religious faith can produce individuals who are peaceful, productive, and a net asset to any country which harbors them.  So instead of persecution, arrests, and forced retraining, which are likely to inspire counter-movements and even terrorism, perhaps we can persuade the Chinese government to change its attitude toward minorities like the Uighurs and allow them to practice their faiths and preserve their cultures. 

That would be nice if we could make it happen, but so far it's just a policy idea.  Right now, the Chinese government seems to think more and more surveillance is the answer, and has invested billions in technology and hiring of police to the point that in some regions of Xinjiang, the only stable, reliable job you can get is to work for the police and spy on your neighbors.

In the U. S., such difficulties seem exotic and far away, and it's easy to forget that the same technology Beijing is using to control its Uighur population is available here.  I suppose it's better for megabytes of personal information about us to be in the control of private companies who have a good reason to behave themselves if they want to stay in business, rather than a government desperate to remain in control under any circumstances.  But the information is out there just the same, and the sad plight of the Uighurs in China reminds us that except for the traditions of freedom in the U. S., we might be in the same boat.

Sources:  Isobel Cockerell's article "Inside China's Massive Surveillance Operation" appeared on May 9, 2019 at https://www.wired.com/story/inside-chinas-massive-surveillance-operation/.  Thomas F. Farr's "Diplomacy and Persecution in China" appeared in the May 2019 issue of First Things, pp. 29-36.