Source:  Wikipedia, US State Department

The US State Department has a broader action on technology from China that is banning apps and is part of a US-China split of the internet, technology and business world into the China side and the US side.

The Tik Tok and WeChat executive orders are only a small part.

India and China have a small border war in 2020. India has also taken action to ban Chinese apps and Chinese technology companies.

During the first Cold War between the US and the Soviets, the world was split into the eastern and western blocs.

Above is the map of the eastern and western blocs of the first cold war.

Curing the first Cold War the Western Bloc, also known as the Capitalist Bloc, was a coalition of countries that were allied with the United States, a member of NATO, and/or opposed the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. The latter were referred to as the Eastern Bloc.

The first phase of the first Cold War began immediately after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The United States created the NATO military alliance in 1949 in the apprehension of a Soviet attack and termed their global policy against Soviet influence containment. The Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in response to NATO. Major crises of this phase included the 1948–49 Berlin Blockade, the 1927–50 Chinese Civil War, the 1950–53 Korean War, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The USSR and the US competed for influence in Latin America, the Middle East, and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia.

Wikipedia has an entry describing the still not universally agreed outline of Coldwar 2.0.

Dividing the Global Internet in Cold War 2.0

China has had its Great Firewall started in 1998. The first part of the GFW (great firewall) lasted eight years and was completed in 2006. The second part began in 2006 and ended in 2008. On 6 December 2002, 300 people in charge of the GFW project from 31 provinces and cities throughout China participated in a four-day inaugural “Comprehensive Exhibition on Chinese Information System”. At the exhibition, many western high-tech products, including Internet security, video monitoring and human face recognition were purchased. Aside from the social control aspect, the Great Firewall also acts as a form of trade protectionism that has allowed China to grow its own internet giants, such as Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu. China has its own version of many foreign web properties, for example: Tencent Video (YouTube), Tencent Weibo (Twitter), Qzone (Facebook), WeChat (WhatsApp), Ctrip (Orbitz and others), Zhihu (Quora). With nearly one quarter of the global internet population (700 million users), the internet behind the GFW can be considered a “parallel universe” to the Internet that exists outside.

Google China’s search engine was launched in 2006 and pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results.

The United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) “National Trade Estimate Report” published in March 2016 referred the China’s digital Great Firewall: “China’s filtering of cross-border Internet traffic has posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers.” NOTE: President Trump was not inaugurated until January 20, 2017.

Claude Barfield, the American Enterprise Institute’s expert of International trade, suggested that the U.S. government should bring a case against the Firewall, a huge trade barrier, in the World Trade Organization in January 2017. 8 of the 24 more trafficked websites in China have been blocked by The Great Firewall.

The US Clean Network program has five categories of action.

The US Clean Network are as follows:

* Clean Carrier: To ensure untrusted People’s Republic of China (PRC) carriers are not connected with U.S. telecommunications networks. Such companies pose a danger to U.S. national security and should not provide international telecommunications services to and from the United States.
* Clean Store: To remove untrusted applications from U.S. mobile app stores. PRC apps threaten our privacy, proliferate viruses, and spread propaganda and disinformation. American’s most sensitive personal and business information must be protected on their mobile phones from exploitation and theft for the CCP’s benefit.
* Clean Apps: To prevent untrusted PRC smartphone manufacturers from pre-installing –or otherwise making available for download – trusted apps on their apps store. Huawei, an arm of the PRC surveillance state, is trading on the innovations and reputations of leading U.S. and foreign companies. These companies should remove their apps from Huawei’s app store to ensure they are not partnering with a human rights abuser.
* Clean Cloud: To prevent U.S. citizens’ most sensitive personal information and our businesses’ most valuable intellectual property, including COVID-19 vaccine research, from being stored and processed on cloud-based systems accessible to our foreign adversaries through companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.
* Clean Cable: To ensure the undersea cables connecting our country to the global internet are not subverted for intelligence gathering by the PRC at hyper scale. We will also work with foreign partners to ensure that undersea cables around the world aren’t similarly subject to compromise.

Momentum for the Clean Network program is growing. More than thirty countries and territories are now Clean Countries, and many of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies are Clean Telcos. All have committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.

Techdirt has an article by Mike Masnick which suggests that the US should stay on the side of an open internet and open technology and business world.

There is other analysis that China should not be allowed to steal US technology intellectual property without any effective challenge. All companies try to steal technology. China is better at it. However, this has been mostly one-way technology theft. Cisco and other US technology giants have departments that deal with technology copying from Huawei and other companies for many years to two to three decades.