China accuses US of ‘political suppression’ over TikTok, WeChat ban

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Beijing on Friday accused the United States of “suppression” after President Donald Trump ordered sweeping restrictions against Chinese social media giants TikTok and WeChat.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular press briefing that the US move came at the expense of American users and companies.

Trump’s executive orders, which take effect in 45 days, bar anyone under US jurisdiction from doing business with the owners of TikTok or WeChat.

They come as the world’s two biggest economies clash over a host of issues from the coronavirus to Hong Kong and Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

Trump’s orders say the social media giants are a threat to US “national security, foreign policy, and economy”, as the president seeks to curb China’s power in global technology.

Wang said “the US frequently abuses its national power and unjustifiably suppresses non-US companies”.

“At the expense of the rights and interests of US users and companies, the US… is carrying out arbitrary political manipulation and suppression,” he added.

Trump, had on Thursday, invoked his emergency economic powers to impose broad sanctions against TikTok, a move that steps up pressure on the Chinese-owned app to sell its U.S. assets to an American company.

In the order, which takes effect in 45 days, any transactions between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and U.S. citizens will be outlawed for national security reasons.

The order likely will mean the viral video service could no longer receive advertising from American companies and the app could be removed from Apple and Google’s app stores.

For the more than 100 million Americans who have downloaded TikTok, experts say the app may no longer be sent software updates, rendering TikTok unmanageable, and eventually non-functional, with time.

“When we talk about sanctions against Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats, well, the sanctions are that no American can do business with them,” Stewart Baker, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency, said last month when speculation about the order first began to spread.

AFP

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