Chinese authorities have monitored democracy activists through WeChat, while experts have also warned of the potential risks of data collection through TikTok.
Akio Yaita examines Zoom’s interruption of an online Tiananmen memorial, large networks of Twitter accounts linked to the Chinese Communist Party, and China’s expanding influence operations across the internet, warning that the Japanese government and society have yet to recognise the seriousness of the threat.

June 30, 2020
Zoom faced a storm of criticism from around the world for assisting China in its suppression of free speech.
This incident also revealed that China’s public-security authorities monitor the content of online meetings conducted through Zoom.
The following is taken from Akio Yaita’s regular column entitled “China’s Shadow Lurking on the Internet,” published in the monthly magazine WiLL.
The monthly magazine WiLL is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but also for people throughout the world.
Anyone who has not yet subscribed should immediately head to the nearest bookstore.
That is because it is filled with genuine essays such as this one.
And yet, it costs only 920 yen, including consumption tax.
This is a story I heard several years ago from a Beijing democracy activist who had been temporarily detained by the Chinese police.
Late at night, he was taken from his home to a police facility.
When he entered what appeared to be an interrogation room, he saw a screen on the wall displaying the WeChat messaging application installed on his mobile phone.
Exchanges he had had with several friends about six months earlier were displayed in enlarged form, and passages regarded as “criticism of the government” had been marked with red lines.
A police officer threatened him, saying, “With this much evidence, we could arrest you immediately for subversion of state power.”
The activist said that he was terrified when he learned for the first time that his words and actions had been monitored through an application on his mobile phone.
Because WeChat is an application developed and operated by a Chinese company, it may be only natural that information exchanged through it can be obtained by China’s public-security authorities.
Today, WeChat is installed on the mobile phones of almost all Japanese businesspeople engaged in business with China.
Quite a few Japanese people praise it as “easy to use.”
They do not seem particularly conscious that their personal information may be completely exposed to the Chinese authorities and that, in some cases, corporate secrets could be stolen.
TikTok, a short-video platform application also developed by a Chinese company, is said to be even more troublesome than WeChat.
Because anyone can easily create attractive videos set to music, it has become popular among younger generations, particularly in Asia.
Its users tend to be young, and in Japan it is used mainly by junior-high and high-school students.
According to a Taiwanese information-technology expert, downloading TikTok may allow data inside the mobile phone to be stolen and may also enable the user’s current location to be identified.
Over the past several years, it has spread throughout the world at an astonishing rate, and the number of users has already exceeded 1.5 billion.
The expert said, “China must be using TikTok to collect various kinds of data.”
Chinese products are not the only source of danger.
It has also become clear that Zoom, the American video-conferencing service widely used by Japanese companies for online meetings, is under the influence of China’s public-security authorities.
On June 4, democracy activists living in the United States used Zoom to hold an online gathering in memory of the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on the democracy movement, which had occurred on that day in 1989, 31 years earlier.
Several hundred activists from the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, and mainland China participated.
However, the meeting was interrupted.
The Zoom accounts of former Tiananmen student leaders and human-rights lawyers living in various parts of the world suddenly became unusable.
A Zoom spokesperson later admitted to the media, “We suspended the communications service after coming under pressure from the Chinese authorities.”
The company explained that the meeting might have violated Chinese domestic law and stated, “We must comply with the laws of the countries and regions in which we conduct business.”
However, Zoom faced a storm of criticism from around the world for assisting China in its suppression of free speech.
This incident also revealed that China’s public-security authorities monitor the content of online meetings conducted through Zoom.
Should the Chinese authorities choose to do so, they might be able to obtain details of every internal meeting held by companies around the world using the service.
Some people say that the answer is simply to use social media services that have not entered the Chinese market, but in reality, even that offers no guarantee of safety.
In mid-June, the major American social media company Twitter announced that it had removed more than 170,000 accounts believed to be connected to the Chinese Communist Party for engaging in information manipulation.
Of those more than 170,000 accounts, approximately 20,000 posted messages praising Chinese government policies, while the remaining approximately 150,000 accounts spread those posts.
In fact, during the previous summer, Twitter had also removed 936 accounts out of approximately 200,000 for the same reason.
The 170,000 accounts uncovered this time were newly registered after that earlier action.
It goes without saying that large numbers of similar accounts used by China for information manipulation have also been registered on Google and Facebook.
The information we encounter every day on the internet may be fake news created through these Chinese “human-wave tactics.”
Europe, the United States, and Taiwan have recently launched “cleansing operations” aimed at removing the infiltration of the internet by the Chinese authorities.
They have begun taking measures such as prohibiting the use of software and applications under Chinese influence.
The reality, however, is that the Japanese government and Japanese society still fail entirely to recognise the seriousness of the problem.