Why Are We Allowing Dangerous Chinese Tech Companies To Operate On American Soil?

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is synonymous with espionage. The country’s tech companies, we’re told, give the CCP a vital edge. Companies include the likes of Baidu and Alibaba. Why, then, are both operating on U.S. soil?

Alibaba is China’s answer to Amazon. The Chinese multinational technology company specializes in e-commerce, retail, internet, and technology, to name just a few areas. The problematic company has a business presence in dozens of countries, including the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The fact that Alibaba, very much an ally of the CCP, is operating in the U.S., China’s fiercest rival, is worrisome, to say the least.

It certainly worries Charles Dunst, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dunst recently wrote an eye-opening article that revolved around a rather sobering shopping experience. Earlier this year, the researcher was shopping at a CVS near his apartment in Virginia. At the self-checkout counter, he scanned for payment options; besides cash and credit/debit cards, other options included Apple Pay, PayPal, and Alipay, Alibaba’s online payment platform. This made Dunst stop and think.

In truth, American retailers have been offering the Alipay option of payment for years, all in an effort to attract more Chinese tourists. The app has at least 4 million users in the United States. Initially, as Dunst noted, the Alipay payment option was confined to luxury shops, “to capture the spending of well-off Chinese tourists.” However, the platform quickly expanded into your average, everyday American stores, like Walgreens, 7/11, and the aforementioned CVS.

Interestingly, some of the biggest cities in the United States now allow riders to pay their taxi fares using the app. As Dunst highlights, although this expansion is heavily focused on serving the needs of Chinese visitors, “Alipay’s presence at the center of ordinary U.S. commerce will expand the platform’s brand awareness among U.S. shoppers, possibly even winning a few adoptees in the process.”

In her new book, aptly titled, “Trafficking Data: How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty,” Aynne Kokas discusses just why the expansion of companies like Alibaba in the United States should be of genuine concern to the country’s leaders. Alibaba is first and foremost a tech company. And what do tech companies love? Data. Lots of it. Similarly, the CCP also loves data, especially Americans’ data. 

Kokas, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, demonstrates how the CCP capitalizes on this data flow for political gain. A company as powerful as Alibaba can contribute greatly to data trafficking, by moving inordinate amounts of data out of the United States and back to China. This creates an environment that “not only exploits consumers,” but completely “empowers the Chinese government,” Kokas notes.

Like Kokas, Dunst believes that the United States’ failure to effectively “regulate data gathering by tech firms operating in the United States at the federal level has allowed firms from