Obama sharply criticises China's plans for new technology rules
Barack Obama has criticised China's plans for new rules on American tech firms and urged Beijing to change its policy if it wants to do business with the US.
US President Barack Obama has criticised China's plans for new rules on American tech firms. He had raised the issue with President Xi Jinping and urged Beijing to change its policy if it wants to do business with the US, he said.
Obama said he was concerned about Beijing's plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology companies to hand over encryption keys - the passcodes that help protect data - and install security "backdoors" in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access.
"This is something I've raised directly with President Xi," Obama said. "We have made it very clear this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with [us]."
Beijing sees the rules as crucial to protect state and business secrets. But Western companies say they reinforce increasingly onerous terms of doing business in the world's second-largest economy and add to mistrust over cybersecurity between Washington and Beijing.China's standing committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) read a second draft of its first anti-terrorism law last week; the legislation is to be adopted soon.
Last year's initial draft requires firms to keep servers and user data in China, supply communications records to law enforcement officials and censor terrorism-related web content.
The laws "would essentially force all foreign companies to turn over to the Chinese government mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those services", Obama said. "As you might imagine, tech companies are not going to be willing to do that."
The scope of the rules goes far beyond recently adopted financial industry regulations that urged Chinese banks to buy from domestic technology vendors.
Obama said the rules could backfire on China. "Those kinds of restrictive practices I think would ironically hurt the Chinese economy over the long term because I don't think there is any US or European firm - any international firm - that could credibly get away with that wholesale turning over of data, personal data, over to a government."
Hua Chunying, China's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said its counterterrorism law was "a requirement for the government in combating terrorism; the relevant matter is completely China's internal affair."
Beijing has argued about the need to quickly tighten its cybersecurity measures in the wake of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations of sophisticated US spying techniques.
China's leaders say it faces a serious threat from religious extremists and separatists. Hundreds of people have died in the past two years in Xinjiang in unrest Beijing has blamed on Islamists, who want to establish a separate state called East Turkestan.
