Dispute Wechat: Trump bans, China's lifeline

When Wendy Tang, 25 years old, in New York, homesick, it opens on your Smartphone, China's lifeline: Wechat.

Hendrik Ankenbrand

business correspondent for China, based in Shanghai.

The App that the term "kurnachrichten service" describes only a very limited extent, has on the whole world about 1.2 billion users. Most of them live in China. In the United States, about three million resident ethnic Chinese to communicate in the people's Republic.

the longing for The family in Beijing, Wendy Tang seizes quite often. For seven years she studied in the United States, first in journalism at Stony Brook University, she is now enrolled at Brooklyn Law School in New York City, where she writes her doctoral thesis in law.

The parents and the little brother living in China's capital, 11,000 kilometers away. "My mother, I write every day, hundreds of messages on Wechat," says Tang in an interview with F. A. Z. your father sends you "a couple of messages or less", as is your brother.

Surveillance is the open secret

However, the family has also set up a group chat in Wechat the messages all four. "I send my family photos of the food, what I cooked, and images of my everyday life here in America," Tang. Conversely, it receives photos from China, in order to know what's going on in the lives of Others.

That you can write on Wechat short texts or voice messages to send, the App is the ideal means of communication for the foreign student. To make phone calls to each other, the time shift of twelve hours between Beijing and New York, not ideal, says Tang. "It is easier to write in the free time of each, what you want to say."

so it is not, however. The Chinese government let the App monitor, there are written content to censor and to control the overseas Chinese this way, and to discipline tests, like the American government claims, is a fact. Many studies have proven and in China is an open secret. Who sent on Wechat, a friend, an article in the F. A. Z., the critically engages with the Regime in Beijing, learns of this, under certain circumstances, anything – because the message will be filtered by the censorship of the algorithm, and not the other matters.