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| Banning WeChat will sever user relationships with Chinese families |
US President Donald Trump has banned the use of the popular Chinese messaging app (WeChat) in transactions. This cut off contact with Chinese family and friends. Thousands of users in the US are concerned that they are the latest casualties of the confrontation between the two countries.
Chinese internet giant Tencent's WeChat is popular with Chinese students, foreigners, and some Americans who have personal or business relationships in China.
In the US, the most popular messaging apps in the US including WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram have been banned in China.
This ban cut off the more than 6 million Chinese who live in the US and their families in China.
According to an analytics company (Apptopia), WeChat had an average of 19 million daily active users in the United States over the past three months.
Expat is setting up a backup plan in the US as some WeChat users have started sharing backup copies of their contacts with a limited number of apps still available in China, including Microsoft Skype and LinkedIn.
Others plan to operate in China using a VPN to bypass the firewall that is blocking foreign applications from entering China.
One user said, when I was in China, I had to use Gmail and Instagram (VPN) to work properly and never thought I'd have to do similar things in the US.
Some overseas Chinese in the US fear that this is just the latest blow to the deteriorating US-China relationship.
One employee said, “My parents cared more about me when they saw this message. They asked me to seriously consider returning to China in the current political environment.
The President of the United States issued an Executive Order prohibiting the United States from doing business with Chinese technology companies Tencent and Bytedance.
Tencent owns a Chinese messaging app (WeChat) and Bytedance is the parent company of the popular short video sharing app Tik Tok. The ban will go into effect within 45 days, and Beijing can respond.