Battles beyond the Great Firewall: India shuts out Chinese tech companies

Late last week, news broke that India’s Intelligence Bureau had fingered Chinese chat app WeChat as a potential threat and that the app was under investigation; some reports even say that the Intelligence Bureau wants the app banned outright. Chinese telecom equipment companies ZTE and Huawei are similarly under investigation for posing potential national security threats. It makes you wonder: will any Chinese tech companies be allowed to succeed in India?

Another question, of course, is whether or not they should. India’s concerns about the security threats posed by ZTE and Huawei are concerns that have been echoed by other governments, and both companies do seem to have ties to the Chinese military (both have also had dealings with some fairly questionable regimes). But the case against WeChat is definitely thinner, at least in terms of the information that’s publicly available. Is the fact that the app is Chinese enough to make it a de facto security threat? It seems harsh; but with all the revelations of hacking and web surveillance that have come out over the past year, it might be arguable that no government should allow any international tech companies to operate within its borders.

Of course, India and China do have a fairly antagonistic history, and even today the countries disagree on where the Sino-Indian border lies, so there’s not a lot of love lost between the two of them. India’s increasing suspicion towards Chinese tech companies will likely be seen as an unfair, protectionist move in China (try not to giggle at the irony of China accusing other countries of protectionism in the tech industry), but the truth is we really don’t know enough to judge whether any of these companies is a real security threat. If there’s a smoking gun out there, no one has yet revealed it, and we’re left to wonder what the hell is actually happening behind the scenes. Are Chinese tech companies posing a real threat, or is this, like China’s accusations about Cisco, just a propaganda tool in a much broader battle over international trade?

I genuinely have no idea, although I suspect the truth may lie somewhere in the middle. But since none of these accusations has come with much evidence and we’re all just speculating, I put the question to you, dear readers: is this unfair anti-China bias, trade protectionism, or reasonable reactions to tangible security threats?

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This article by C.Custer originally appeared on Tech in Asia, a Burn Media publishing partner.