Advertisement
US-China tech war
TechPolicy

US-China tech decoupling: Zoom woes reveal narrowing space for firms to reconcile both systems

  • A former Zoom employee is accused of shutting down online meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square crackdown, some hosted outside China
  • Zoom, like other US companies, faces a choice of complying with increasingly stringent Chinese government rules or quitting the market altogether

Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
5
A student takes classes online with his companions using the Zoom app at home during the coronavirus outbreak in El Masnou, north of Barcelona, Spain on April 2, 2020. Photo: Reuters
Masha Borak
Recently revealed US charges against a China-based Zoom employee for censoring virtual meetings commemorating Beijing’s crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989 show how the space for global technology firms to operate in both China and the US is narrowing amid an economic, technological and ideological rivalry between the two countries, according to analysts.
Jin Xinjiang, a China-based former employee with Zoom who is also known as Julien Jin, is accused of censoring online meetings hosted on the popular video conferencing app at the request of the Chinese government, according to a US Department of Justice (DOJ) complaint and arrest warrant unsealed last Friday. The meetings disrupted were in commemoration of the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown in June 1989, a taboo topic in China.

Jin, 39, is also accused of providing information on users located outside China, including names, email addresses and IP addresses.

If convicted of conspiring since January 2019 to use Zoom’s systems to censor speech, Jin faces up to 10 years in prison. He is currently not in US custody.

The allegations against the former Zoom employee – which included setting up fake accounts using profile pictures with terrorism-related or pornographic imagery to get sensitive meetings banned from the platform – may take some time to untangle, but Alexander Capri, a visiting senior fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Business School, said the incident reflects the strengthening grip of the Chinese Communist Party over companies operating in the country.

Advertisement