A US WeChat ban could hurt many in America, not just China

For millions of people in the U.S. who use the Chinese app WeChat, it's a lifeline to friends, family, customers and business contacts in China.

That lifeline is now under attack by an executive order from President Donald Trump that could ban the app in the U.S. as early as mid-September, potentially severing vital relationships.

“It’s the first thing I check in the morning,” Sha Zhu, a Chinese-American in Washington, says of WeChat. It's how she talks to her mother and old friends from China, which she left in 2008, and how she communicates with her colleagues as a public relations manager for a Chinese-owned consulting company. It's where she stores Chinese currency in her virtual wallet.

Most important, it's where she keeps videos and audio clips of her father, who died four years ago.

In China, WeChat, or Weixin as it’s known, is critical infrastructure — texting, social media, cab-hailing, payments and more, all wrapped into one app. Many Chinese businesses don’t even take credit cards anymore, just WeChat. It has over a billion users, owner Tencent says, mostly in China. Mobile app firms have varying estimates for U.S. downloads — in the range of 19 to 26 million.

For people in the U.S., WeChat has less functionality than it does in China. But it’s what connects immigrants and students from China to their pasts and to each other. Chinese restaurants in the U.S. use it to take food orders. Businesspeople in the U.S. that have work in China rely on it as well.

Kurt Braybrook, who spent 22 years doing business in Shanghai before moving back to the U.S. in 2017, says the app is irreplaceable for him and his China-born wife. He could lose roughly 500 WeChat contacts, few of which he could reach without the app.

“If they banned it entirely, it will...