People are waking up to Chinese surveillance
TikTok is spying on you.
But WeChat is even more dangerous.
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
The Chinese spy balloon that crossed the US earlier this month was a visual reminder
of how the Chinese Communist Party will do anything to spy on and threaten other countries.
It’s also a visual reminder of what a clown show they are.
But balloons are the least of our worries. Chinese apps like TikTok are right in the
pockets of millions of users—and they’re a huge threat to privacy and national security.
Not to mention a threat to Costco members just trying to shop in peace. I swear,
if she’s blocking the free samples, I’m gonna lose it.
I’ve mentioned in a previous episode how China uses TikTok to collect vast
amounts of data and uses it to track down journalists and other Americans.
Here’s just a snippet of what TikTok collects.
If you want to learn more about TikTok, click the link below.
People are slowly waking up to the threat TikTok poses.
And they’re gradually putting restrictions on it.
But there’s a Chinese app that’s even more dangerous: WeChat .
And not just because of the endless group chats with your family. Yes...I’m excited
to hear what my fourth cousin in Missouri had for lunch. Again. Thanks for adding me, Mom.
WeChat is China’s other Trojan horse.
With more than 1.2 billion users worldwide, WeChat is an all-in-one app developed by Tencent.
WeChat can do anything and everything, far more than TikTok’s ridiculous dance videos.
Aside from sending text messages, users on WeChat can also order food delivery,
hail taxis, send money, date, game, buy airline and movie tickets, make doctors’ appointments,
pay bills, use government services, and a gazillion other things. It can do it all.
It’s like TikTok, Instagram, Grubhub, Uber, Venmo, Tinder,
Steam, Ticketmaster, PayPal, and waiting in line at the DMV had a baby together.
Sounds convenient. Even Elon Musk wants to replicate it for Americans. Yay.
WeChat is China’s most feared surveillance tool.
Like any app that comes from China, WeChat is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.
It uses a mix of text recognition, visual recognition, and other detection tools
to conduct real-time automatic censorship of everything from the
Hong Kong protests to complaints about the Communist Party’s Covid policies.
The only thing it won’t censor is those endless, pointless group chats .
Not even WeChat users outside China are safe from censorship and control.
Remember that list I showed you about the data TikTok collects?
Multiply that by a gazillion, and you get what WeChat can collect. Nothing’s off the
table for WeChat, especially when it has all the records of things people spend money on.
That’s the perk of being an all-in-one app.
Compared to TikTok, WeChat gives the Chinese Communist Party much more leverage over people.
WeChat even knows you actually paid for multiple lessons for
that horrible dance that got zero likes on TikTok. That’s way more embarrassing.
And then let’s say you’re on WeChat. You start using it for everything.
And now what happens if all those perks get taken away?
If you’re in China, tough luck. There are very few alternatives. Foreign apps are banned,
and not many people use text or iMessage in Chinese these days.
This is a social death sentence for many Chinese users.
WeChat is so ingrained in Chinese society and infrastructure that
you can barely function in China without it.
So any ban or the threat of bans from WeChat will prevent Chinese citizens from living normal lives.
“[Being banned from WeChat] means becoming a digital ‘non-person’, with access blocked
to digital services tied to their accounts, from health QR codes to online subscriptions.”
It’s like when your parents grounded you and took away your video games… only instead of
just video games, they also took away your health insurance. Great parenting.
Once banned, people are forced to beg for forgiveness in order
to function in society normally again.
This is a tremendous tool for controlling people inside China. But it also can control people
outside China—even here in the United States. I’ll explain after the break.
Welcome back.
WeChat has made itself indispensable for people living in China and collects a vast
amount of data while doing so. Without it, people can’t function in society.
Not even TikTok can claim to be that essential in people’s lives.
Even for people like this.
And outside China, the Chinese Communist Party uses WeChat for its influence operations.
“When secret police issue threats abroad, they often do so on WeChat. When military
researchers working undercover in the United States needed to talk to China’s embassies,
they used WeChat… The party coordinates via WeChat with members studying overseas.”
The US did consider banning WeChat back in 2020 under then-US President Donald Trump.
And yes, I also see the irony of a social media app ban from a guy who was addicted to Twitter .
But a judge in California blocked Trump’s efforts to ban WeChat.
Critics of the ban, including the ACLU and the Cato Institute,
argued that a total ban on WeChat goes too far.
The argument goes that a ban could violate freedom of expression and
association by cutting off the flow of information, art and communication.
It especially hurts those who have friends and family in China,
as well as those whose businesses depend on WeChat.
WeChat has become the facehugger from Alien. Yes, we know it’s dangerous,
but there’s no way of removing it without harming the person attached to it.
But do the benefits of WeChat outweigh the risks?
No. That’s stupid. WeChat has to be stopped before facehuggers latch onto more people!
WeChat poses a serious threat to users outside of China’s borders.
As I said earlier, once people start putting their lives on WeChat,
the Chinese regime can threaten their access to essential tools, including their money.
China could even blackmail you by threatening to expose
you actually got lessons for that horrible TikTok dance that bombed.
WeChat acts as a trap for China’s diaspora.
Even while living in free societies where there are multiple news sources, many Chinese people use
WeChat as their main go-to source for information and communication. This is because it’s hard to
break old habits. And also because they want to use WeChat to communicate with people in China.
WeChat keeps people voluntarily chained to an app that the Communist Party controls.
This blurs the line between being Chinese inside China and being Chinese abroad.
This has several consequences. For one, WeChat encourages self-censorship—because
you don’t want to get blocked, right? So now self-censorship can
become deeply ingrained behavior, even in countries that allow free speech.
So WeChat isn’t just like a facehugger . It’s a facehugger that traps you in China’s Matrix.
Man, they combined my two favorite sci-fi franchises and ruined them both. Thanks, CCP.
WeChat also encourages people to forget things the CCP doesn’t want you to remember.
WeChat doesn’t allow any external links, index posts like Google,
or even link articles to anything else on the Internet, not even the author’s previous work.
Because of this, people are incentivized “to focus exclusively on content to
be consumed at the moment—short, fragmental, surface-level takes.”
This makes it a lot easier for things like, say,
rewriting the history of Covid and China’s response to it.
You know how a lot of people remember a genie movie starring Sinbad that never existed? It’s
like the CCP saw that and thought, “What if we could cause the Mandela effect… but on purpose!”
Your wish is my command.
Some try to see the positives in keeping WeChat, by saying that it could be used to
facilitate civil participation and public communication with the Chinese community.
I guess then-Australian Prime Minister
Scott Morrison didn’t get the memo. WeChat kicked him off.
Man, could you imagine how crazy it would be if the leader of a country was kicked
off a major social media platform anywhere else? Wow, that’d be nuts.
But as long as people stay dependent on WeChat, communication within the Chinese community will
be monitored by the Chinese Communist Party. And the Party will use WeChat to collect information.
Some people are already getting the memo to at least ban WeChat from government devices.
It was banned in the state of Ohio, as well as North Carolina.
But unless Chinese people abroad learn to diversify and become less dependent on WeChat,
they are by extension, dependent on the CCP.
Oh, and also TikTok. Because that’s also not just a threat to you,
but everyone around you.
And this show is possible because of viewer support. So as a thank you to my wonderful
fans who support China Uncensored through the crowdfunding website Patreon or the
exclusive social media platform Locals, I’ll answer one of your questions:
Richard Wallberg on Patreon asks: “A lot of new phones come with Tiktok already installed,
is uninstalling it enough to keep your phone from
being spied on or do you have to take extra steps to ensure your privacy?”
Good question, Richard. If you want to delete TikTok,
you first need to delete your account—so that your data is gone. Although of course
the CCP may keep a backup of all your old data—including those embarrassing videos.
Then you also need to delete the TikTok app from your mobile phone.
But even if you delete your account and the app—the CCP can still potentially track you.
That’s because if TikTok is installed on your phone at any point, TikTok will collect your
IMSI number. That’s a code that identifies you by your SIM card. Using your IMSI number,
the CCP can connect your name with your phone, and then track your phone.
So the only way to stop *that* is to get a new SIM card.
So go to your local T-Mobile store or whichever carrier you use,
and ask them for a new SIM card. You might want to get a new phone number,
too, since the CCP can still potentially track you with that.
And this applies not only to TikTok, but to all Chinese apps, including WeChat. So if you
had WeChat installed, you might want to delete your account, the app, and get a new SIM card.
Thanks for your question, Richard.
And thanks to everyone else who supports China Uncensored through Patreon. Join us
at Patreon and contribute a dollar or more per episode. You’ll get a lot of cool perks,
including me answering your questions on the show. Check out Patreon.com/ChinaUncensored.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.