Cindy Wang’s entire life is on WeChat.
Through the Chinese Everything app, the 24-year-old shops for clothes and sends photos and audio messages to her grandparents in Guangzhou. It’s how she planned appointments with her hairstylist and where she found her bao supplier – a local woman who sells the steamed buns from her car.
For millions of people around the world, and in swaths of the United States with concentrated Chinese populations – including Southern California communities in the San Gabriel Valley and Irvine, where Wang lives – WeChat is a way of life.
“We always use WeChat because everyone uses it,” Wang said. “It’s like a Facebook messenger but ten times better, ten times more sophisticated.”
But with the Trump administration targeting the app, she worries that she and her parents will soon be cut off from their cultural community in the U.S. and lose the last line of communication they have with the rest of them. family thousands of miles away.
Trump signed executive orders last week ruled out business transactions with WeChat and TikTok, the popular video app. The actions came after Washington considered apps by Chinese software companies to be national security threats, warning that they could endanger the privacy of Americans.
While the dictation was vague and its impact remains unclear, experts say the order could pull the WeChat app out of Apple and Google online stores if it goes live in less than 45 days. Without the ability to download updates, users of the app would become more vulnerable to security breaches and miss out on tweaks that make it work smoothly, thereby reducing the app’s usefulness over time.
In his rhetoric, Trump has kept the focus on TikTok, haranguing and threatening the company for months, but WeChat users may feel the effects of its actions more sharply. This is because TikTok has an out: Microsoft has publicly acknowledged this it is in talks with the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to take control of operations in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. If sales continue, consumers are unlikely to disappear again soon with the app disappearing.
No such fallback plan exists for WeChat, often described as the Swiss Army of apps – a messaging service, payment platform and social network all in one. With China’s patchwork of Internet firewalls, filters, and censors that exclude most outside technology, WeChat is one of the few bridges left between China and the rest of the digital world.
News of the federal government’s WeChat hack sent Southland communities and Chinese enclaves nationwide into panic, with people scanning news, posting angry and scary rumors online and posting messages and friends to let girls and families know what the decision was for them, their families and their businesses.
A White House petition “WeChat should not be banned” Friday blew up on local WeChat feeds. Beginning July 14, after White House Trade Adviser Peter Navarro threatened to take action against WeChat, the petition has collected more than 60,000 signatures.
Several WeChat users in Southern California said their friends started signing up for accounts on Line, a Korean-owned messaging app popular in Japan, and Facebook-owned WhatsApp, in the hours after the ban was announced , desperately looking for WeChat alternatives – although both of these apps are blocked in China.
“There is definitely a lot of fear. This is an essential platform for Chinese immigrants in the United States, ”said Sunny Shao, a researcher at AAPI Data and PhD candidate at UC Riverside who studies political participation at WeChat.
WeChat, known as Weixin in China, started as a project at Tencent Research Center in morning business in Guangzhou in 2010, and gained traction as a mobile messaging service after its launch in early 2011.
But WeChat wanted to be more than just a social network. For the Lunar New Year in 2014, WeChat developed its ‘red package’ tool – a digital way to send small amounts of money to other users, and emulate ‘hongbao’, endowed with red envelopes during holidays and public holidays. The tool was a sensation overnight, according to the South China Morning Post.
Combining the functionality of Facebook, Whatsapp, Venmo and more, WeChat is woven into almost every aspect of life in China. People use it to pick up taxis, pay for food and buy plane tickets. Since February, a nationwide health removal system embedded within the app has been used to arrange travel and enforce quarantine.
It is the most popular app for China, with more than 1.2 billion monthly users worldwide. In the US, the platform has 19 million daily active users, according to data company Apptopia.
In the San Gabriel Valley, where at least nine cities have a majority Asian population, and Asian Americans and Latinos make up 74% of the population, some local authorities have used WeChat for official outreach to constituencies.
Alhambra Police Department in 2015 became the first in the country to adopt WeChat, using the app to inform residents about law enforcement activities. The city of San Gabriel has a part-time worker who translates her regular communications into Chinese and places them on WeChat and Weibo (another Chinese social network) accounts, according to city councilor Jason Pu, who has lobbied the city for involvement. increase in the Chinese-speaking population since it was first elected in 2013. Arcadia also has an official WeChat account.
It’s hard to underestimate how much of life for the Chinese diaspora of California originates on WeChat. Local restaurants and supermarkets like 99 Ranch Market use it as a payment method to provide tourists and students with Chinese bank accounts. People shop, read news and organize donations and political actions there. Restaurants can integrate their menus directly into the interface. Brokers list properties on the platform. There are many publications that exist exclusively on WeChat.
Tony Ding, a member of San Gabriel City Council, described how social services groups use the app to collect donations of personal protective equipment and organize seminars to spread awareness about important COVID help information, such as how small companies can support their employees through Paycheck Protection Program Loans.
In California, WeChat helped spark political participation among Asian immigrant populations. Community organizers used it to send protests against initiatives for affirmative action such as Senate Constitutional Amendment 5 (later sheltered) and Proposition 16, which would remove the state’s ban on affirmative action from the California Constitution. approved this fall.
Beyond tamping civic engagement, the WeChat collapse could have major implications for both regional and cross-border trade. WeChat supports the underground skin industry in Southern California from home-cooked Chinese cuisine – marinated duck wings, stewed pork knuckles and those bosses that Wang buys from, for example, her neighbor.
Amy Duan, who built a follow-up to her Chinese-language food website Chihuo on WeChat, said the ban is cruel to the Chinese community.
Chihuo – which publishes recommendations for dinners and other content about the food sense in some 15 metropolitan areas – has more than 1 million subscribers to WeChat. Duan said the company largely ignored other social media platforms, until earlier this year, when Chihuo appeared on Padma Lakshmi’s Hulu show “Taste the Nation,” and Chihuo got a broader following. However, the company is dependent on the platform.
“If WeChat is really banned, we might have to find some new business models and we’ll have a lot of trouble,” Duan said. “We will prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
More than her own business, however, Duan is concerned about difficulty with San Gabriel Valley restaurants that Chihuo has built partnerships with. Since the beginning of the pandemic, more restaurant owners have created WeChat groups and communities, posting their hours and delivery schedules. Duan makes it a point to order via WeChat instead of delivery apps like Doordash and Postmates, which charge restaurant fees.
For those trading between the US and China, WeChat is an essential means of communication without ready substitutions, said Geoffrey Gertz, a fellow with the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. “Almost everyone in China is on this one app. Anyone trying to find a new solution will be real and in pain, “Gertz said.
Along with small businesses, Gertz said some of the largest U.S. companies could suffer as well. These include Apple, which manufactures its products in China and made $ 44 billion last year. If Apple can not sell phones that can serve WeChat, if the Chinese government brings it in resistance purpose, then its business could be destroyed, he said.
Tony Chen, who owns freight forwarding company TSJ Logistics, based in Cerritos, California, has an agency network that stretches through China, as far north as Dalian and south to Shenzhen. Almost all communication of the company happens through WeChat.
During the day, Chen uses the app to order dumplings and bento boxes and to chat with friends. At dusk, Chinese truck drivers and warehouse managers reported Chen with updates on pickup times and routes. Money is collected, and drivers are paid through WeChat. “I’m constantly on the app,” he said.
While the ban will be an enormous nuisance to his business, Chen said he thinks it should have happened a long time ago.
There is a general understanding that talking about sensitive topics like Hong Kong or Taiwanese democracy movements over WeChat is a no-no, Chen said. His family is Taiwanese, and for security reasons he mostly uses the Korean property Line to communicate.
While security concerns over TikTok are largely speculative, oversight of WeChat talks and propaganda pushing by the Chinese government has been documented by cyber researchers at the Citizen Lab in Toronto and open source data security collective GDI Foundation, who say messages are blocked and stored in a database linked to public security agencies in China.
Still others say the app is a major bridge to China to completely get rid of.
San Francisco marketing agency owner Charlie Gu on Friday morning passed field calls from panicked clients asking what the Trump administration’s goal of WeChat would mean to them. His firm helps American brands sell themselves to Chinese consumers. A big part of his job is helping companies, like the Beverly Center on La Cienega Boulevard, develop a presence on WeChat.
Gu tells his clients that he only has as much information as they do. “It’s new and fresh and we’re waking up to it – trying to understand what it means,” Gu said. “The lack of clarity causes a lot of companies uncertainty.”
It also threatens to limit his bond with those closest to him. Gu, his husband, his parents and extended family are all in the same WeChat group, where they share stories and plan trips. Gu’s husband does not speak Chinese. But WeChat has built-in text translation tools that make it easy for him to communicate his thoughts on the app.
On Friday, Gu bought a year-long subscription to a virtual private network service of the type Internet users in China to access blocked websites, as a precautionary measure.
‘It feels sad that we are living in this world where this decoupling is happening. It’s really sad for me, ”he said. “We are caught in the middle of this escalation.”
