The U.S. has long decried China’s ‘Great Firewall’—now it’s building its own
The Trump administration is now building a different kind of wall.
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Donald Trump campaigned for president on a promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” between the United States and Mexico. Now, as his bid for re-election heads into the home stretch, Trump’s top diplomat is calling for the construction of another wall, this one digital, to separate the U.S. and China.
On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo outlined a sweeping five-point “Clean Network” program designed to remove “untrusted” Chinese apps like TikTok, the wildly popular social media platform, and WeChat, China’s leading messaging app, from U.S. app stores.
Pompeo’s call for a crackdown on Chinese tech firms follows Trump’s vow to ban TikTok from the U.S. The president has since relented a little, agreeing the app can remain if it is sold to American owners no later than September 15—and if the U.S. Treasury gets a cut of the proceeds.
Beijing expressed outrage at Trump’s decree. Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi called it “a textbook case of bullying.” TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based Bytedance, says it is in talks with Microsoft about a possible sale.
But Pompeo’s new measures go far beyond regulating TikTok. Taken together, they would significantly expand the scope of U.S. confrontation with China on tech issues and hasten the devolution of the global Internet into a “splinternet” of fragmented national markets.
Pompeo vowed to limit the ability of Chinese cloud service providers to collect, store, and process data in the U.S., an effort could impede the U.S. operations of tech giants including Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu. He promised the administration would work to bar American software providers like Google and Apple from allowing their apps to be preinstalled on handsets sold by Chinese companies like Huawei Technology or ZTE, and prevent those companies from featuring U.S. apps on their app stores.
He also called on the Federal Communications Commission to revoke permission for China Telecom and three other unidentified firms to provide international communications services to and from the U.S. and urged closer scrutiny of Chinese firms operating undersea cables.
Trump officials charge that China’s tech companies aid and abet the nation’s communist rulers in surveilling and controlling citizens at home. They allege that allowing those firms to operate in the U.S. would risk the privacy of American consumers and expose American businesses to Chinese hacking and intellectual property theft.
It’s easy to dismiss Pompeo’s proposals as political theater. With less than three months before election day, Trump is sinking in the polls. Republican strategists have long argued that attacking China is one of the few campaign gambits that resonates with voters from both parties. But multiple recent polls show Americans aren’t convinced Trump would do a better job dealing with China than Joe Biden.
And the breadth and character of Pompeo’s proposal gives even critics of Chinese tech policies pause. Some worry that, in an effort to resist China’s authoritarian control of the Internet, the U.S. has become an authoritarian regime itself, aping the idea of “Internet sovereignty”—the notion that the Internet’s purpose isn’t to empower individuals and encourage the exchange of information and ideas but bolster the legitimacy of the state—that was first articulated by China.
China, of course, has erected an elaborate “Great Firewall” to block U.S. tech giants, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to prevent its people from viewing information Beijing deems “sensitive”—and to protect its homegrown tech firms. I wrote about how and why China built that wall in a Fortune cover story as far back as 2006. My conclusion: that China’s digital wall, much like its stone counterpart, was “beginning to crumble.”
That naiveté now makes me cringe. The Great Firewall endured and grew—and now seems to be spawning an American equivalent. Jane Li, writing in Quartz, notes that Pompeo’s “five cleans” are an eery echo of Chinese Internet reform propaganda. The Trump administration’s attempt to shut out platforms based on national origin, Li fears, “would suggest that Beijing’s vision of a fragmented, tightly controlled Internet is triumphing.”
New America Foundation’s Rebecca McKinnon, a former Beijing correspondent for CNN and expert on Chinese Internet policy, expresses similar concern to SUPChina: “If we are going to start blocking Chinese things just because they are blocking our things, then we’re just saying, ‘In order to spite China, let’s turn ourselves into China.’”
Eastworld Spotlight takes a break this week. More Eastworld news below.
Clay Chandler
clay.chandler@fortune.com
This edition of Eastworld was curated and produced by Grady McGregor. Reach him at grady.mcgregor@fortune.com.