India’s app ban raises the stakes for China’s global tech ambitions amid rising geopolitical tensions
- Chinese tech companies have worked hard to penetrate the digital market of Asia’s second-biggest developing economy, with considerable success
India’s recent ban of Chinese apps amid rising tensions on the two countries’ disputed Himalayan border is raising the stakes for many Chinese tech firms, such as ByteDance and Huawei Technologies Co, which have ambitions to grow their footprint in India and beyond, according to some analysts.
In recent years, Chinese tech companies have worked hard to penetrate the digital market of Asia’s second-biggest developing economy, with considerable success in some areas – for example, four out of the top five smartphone makers in India are Chinese.
But that progress is now under threat after India banned 59 Chinese apps and amid a broader anti-China public backlash following the deadly military clash last month.
“If India gets closed off, this could become a signal for many other countries in the world,” said Dev Lewis, a fellow at Hong Kong-based think tank Digital Asia Hub. “Maybe if you look at some African countries … and other countries in Southeast Asia, they could see this as a precedent for how they deal with Chinese tech companies.”
The India ban is a big blow for Chinese app providers in one of the world’s largest app markets, with red-flagged products including viral short video hit TikTok, live-streaming platform Bigo Live, the Zoom videoconferencing app, microblogging platform Weibo, and Tencent Holdings’ social video app Kwai and multipurpose social messaging app WeChat.