China’s “uniquely restrictive” data laws risk boosting US firms’ cost of doing business in the No. 2 economy and could lead to digital decoupling, a new report from a US business group said yesterday.
The Chinese government’s curbs on data movement across borders, ambiguous regulation and inconsistent enforcement “are particularly challenging for multinational firms,” said the US-China Business Council, which describes itself as a private organization of more than 260 US companies operating in the Asian nation.
“If the policies are implemented rigidly, a possible outcome is the creation of data islands that force companies to localize technology, people and processes, disconnecting them from global operations,” the business group said in a report that was based on discussions with more than 30 US companies.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) government has introduced a raft of data, privacy and cybersecurity regulations over the past five years, citing the need to better protect personal information and improve national security. The government also wants to build digital infrastructure and data centers across China with the goal of creating a market for data that propel economic growth.
The strategy is also politically driven, with Xi last year saying he intended to pursue “platform” companies that amass data to create monopolies.
The government later hit Alibaba Group Holding with a record US$2.8 billion fine for abuse of market dominance and told other top Internet companies to rectify anti-competitive practices.
The moves have also rattled investors.
Analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co last month called the Chinese Internet sector “uninvestable,” partly due to regulatory worries.
“Like most governments, Beijing is still figuring out how to thread the needle between protecting data security and enabling cross-border data trade,” said Kendra Schaefer, head of digital research at Trivium China, a consultancy in Beijing.
“It’s uncertain how rigidly existing rules will be enforced, and to what extent they will be adjusted over the long term in response to complaints by foreign businesses,” Schaefer said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS