Expansion of Clean Network Safeguard Could Further Impair Services Trade with Mainland China

The U.S. State Department on 5 August announced the expansion of the Clean Network programme, the Trump administration’s comprehensive approach to guarding the privacy of U.S. citizens and sensitive U.S. company information from “aggressive intrusions by malign actors such as the Chinese Community Party”, in a move that could have further adverse consequences on Sino-U.S. services trade.

This programme now has the following five new lines of effort to protect critical U.S. telecommunications and technology infrastructure.

• Clean Carrier – to ensure untrusted mainland Chinese carriers are not connected with U.S. telecommunications networks because those 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 because mainland Chinese apps threaten U.S. privacy, proliferate viruses, and spread propaganda and disinformation.

• Clean Apps – to prevent untrusted mainland Chinese smartphone manufacturers from pre-installing, or otherwise making available for download, trusted apps on their apps store.

• Clean Cloud – to prevent U.S. citizens’ most sensitive personal information as well as the most valuable intellectual property of U.S. businesses, including COVID-19 vaccine research, from being stored and processed on cloud-based systems accessible to foreign adversaries of the United States through companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent.

• Clean Cable – to ensure the undersea cables connecting the United States to the global internet are not subverted for intelligence gathering by mainland China at hyper scale (the United States will also work with foreign partners to ensure that undersea cables around the world are not similarly subject to compromise).

State notes that more than 30 countries and territories are now “Clean Countries” that have “committed to exclusively using trusted vendors in their Clean Networks.”