US President Donald Trump lost the election and will leave office in a few weeks. He has signed an executive order banning transactions with eight types of Chinese applications, including Alipay and WeChat Pay.
Interestingly, the order is scheduled to take effect within 45 days after Donald Trump leaves office. The applications prohibited by the executive order include those of some of the largest companies such as Ant Group and Tencent.
To justify the ban, Trump said that these apps can access private information from users and can be used by the Chinese government to “track the locations of federal employees and contractors and build personal information files.”
Several American companies, including Apple, Ford, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney, have previously opposed Donald Trump’s executive order, which bans Tencent’s WeChat and ByteDance’s TikTok.
The Federal Court has issued a preliminary injunction banning the injunction on WeChat.
As mentioned above, the executive order banned Alipay, the payment application that Ant Financial has over one billion users.
It also banned three Tencent applications, including WeChat Pay, QQWallet and Tencent QQ. Other applications on the list include CamScanner, SHAREit, Vmate and WPS Office.
This move seems to be driving the China-US trade war. Donald Trump issued an executive order banning Huawei Technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, headquartered in China, and this seems to have begun.
