In addition to national security concerns, President Trump’s moves against Chinese social-media apps also have been driven by his frustration over the coronavirus pandemic and China, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Photo: joshua roberts/ReutersWASHINGTON—President Trump’s concern over national security risks from Chinese social-media companies has been amplified by his frustration over the coronavirus and the challenges it poses to his reelection bid, culminating in two executive orders that raised the stakes in the U.S.-China confrontation, White House aides and outside advisers said Friday.
Mr. Trump signed a pair of orders late Thursday, to take effect in 45 days, that would bar Americans from transactions with the TikTok video app owned by Beijing’s ByteDance Ltd. and the multipurpose WeChat app from Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings Ltd.
“The two big concerns for the American people must be national security and privacy. This is a huge problem with Chinese mobile apps,” said Peter Navarro, an economic adviser to the president, who has consistently been one of the White House’s toughest critics on China.
“They can track, surveil, and monitor while acting as a vacuum cleaner for data or other personal or business information that may wind up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party or People’s Liberation Army,” Mr. Navarro said in an interview.
U.S. officials contend that under China’s Communist Party rule, companies have no choice but to comply with requests from Beijing for data.
The implementation and full ramifications of the orders were still unclear Friday, with the White House referring questions to the Commerce Department. Commerce officials, who were given 45 days to work out details, had no immediate comment.
A person familiar with the decision said the order is aimed solely at WeChat, and not Tencent’s extensive other operations, including mobile and videogames.
A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday called the U.S. action bullying under the pretense of national security.
TikTok issued a statement saying the executive order was done “without due process” and threatening legal action in response. Tencent said it was reviewing the order.
Mr. Trump had already taken aim at the video-sharing app TikTok, and Microsoft Corp. has been in talks to buy its U.S. operations. WeChat, which is used throughout China for text messages, payments and entertainment, represented a new initiative.
In addition to national security concerns, Mr. Trump’s aggressive actions have been driven by his frustration over the coronavirus pandemic and China’s failure to contain it, according to people familiar with his thinking.
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Publicly, he has blamed the outbreak on Beijing and questioned whether the country’s leaders purposefully failed to contain it to spread economic consequences around the globe.
Privately, Mr. Trump has faulted China, and its handling of the virus, for jeopardizing his reelection chances, according to White House officials and advisers outside the administration.
“Our attitude on China has changed greatly since the China virus hit us,” Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday when asked about his push to ban TikTok in the U.S. “I think it changed greatly. It hit the world, and it shouldn’t have. They should have been able to stop it. So, we feel differently.”
One senior administration official said action against the social media platforms had been discussed for several weeks, including Oval Office discussions with Mr. Trump.
While China policy typically divides the president’s team, there was agreement on the security challenges and issues around theft of data, the official said.
“This issue of stealing data is really, really important,” the official added. “In many ways, it’s the heart of the China problem. They just steal at random.”
Beijing has denied organized theft of U.S. trade secrets, but in the phase-one trade pact signed with the U.S. last year it agreed to agreed to stiffen protection of trade secrets and to assess criminal penalties for “willful trade secret misappropriation.”
While a deal for Microsoft to acquire the U.S. operations of TikTok is very much in play, and has support from top administration officials, the attitude toward WeChat is more restrictive.
“I don’t think that app ever had a chance of survival here,” the official said. “We just had no confidence in the security.” Still, the official said it remained to be seen how the order would be carried out.
Jason Waite, a Washington, D.C.-based international trade lawyer with the Alston & Bird LLP law firm, compared the executive orders to an advertisement of a “big coming attraction” that has the national security and legal communities chewing over potential implications. But in the end, no one knows how it will play out.
“At the moment, this definitely has major symbolic impact, and it has the potential to be a lot more than that,” he said. “Until the movie comes out, we don’t know what it’s going to show.”
Still, the possible ramifications are significant for the companies and app users.
TikTok says it has about 100 million monthly users in the U.S., and denies it would hand over user data to the Chinese government.
WeChat is used by more than a billion people in China, and is a key link between China and its overseas diaspora. In the U.S., 19 million people use WeChat daily and it has been used by a range of businesses, from Starbucks Corp. to Walmart Inc., for e-commerce and marketing.
Mr. Trump has faced pressure from conservatives to take a tougher line on China and top lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been raising concern about data collection and national security.
On Thursday, the Senate voted to prohibit federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices. On Friday, the U.S. placed sanctions on senior Chinese officials over Beijing’s Hong Kong policy.
“These actions are being taken against the backdrop of more than a decade of mistrust in which the Chinese Communist Party has stole trillions of dollars of American wealth through cyber hacking, traditional espionage and forced technology transfer,” Mr. Navarro said in an interview.
Such issues were to be partly addressed in the trade accord Mr. Trump worked out with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but the coronavirus has hurt both economies, limiting the effect of first phase product purchases and putting future negotiations, which were to deal with structural concerns, in doubt.
Critics say Mr. Trump’s moves against the technology companies raise free speech issues.
“The Supreme Court held 50 years ago that the First Amendment protects Americans’ right to receive information from abroad,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The privacy and security concerns with platforms like these are real, but we should be wary of setting a precedent that would give this president, and every future one, broad power to interfere with Americans’ access to media.”
Read More
- U.S. Broadens Attack on Chinese Internet Giants With WeChat Order
- Trump Executive Orders Target TikTok, WeChat Apps
- U.S. Sanctions China Officials Over Hong Kong
- WeChat Parent’s Stock Drops
- Heard on the Street: Another Nail in the Coffin of U.S.-China Links
- Q&A: WeChat and Trump’s Order
- TikTok: What You Need to Know
—Katy Stech Ferek contributed to this article.
Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com and Michael C. Bender at Mike.Bender@wsj.com
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