
UN’s partnership with Tencent at odds with its push for global unity - Markoff
https://www.ft.com/content/192f8d60-ac18-415d-b700-78ce5735a5b6
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Markoff
As the coronavirus pandemic rages on with no end in sight, the United Nations
has announced it will partner with Tencent to celebrate its 75th anniversary —
via video conference.

The Chinese tech giant and the UN say they want to have online conversations
with millions of people across the globe about what the world should look like
in 25 years, and the role of international co-operation in solving global
pandemics such as the coronavirus.

The company, which owns the Chinese superapp WeChat, has the biggest social
media reach in China. Its video-conferencing platform Tencent Meeting has more
than 10m daily active users, while VooV Meeting, the international version of
Tencent Meeting, is now available in over 100 countries and regions around the
world.

But the UN’s partnership with Tencent has given privacy campaigners cause for
concern. For one thing, it means sending global conversation data — at some
points unencrypted, and so visible to Tencent — through a country known for
its invasive line on privacy. Like other Chinese tech companies, Tencent is
required to comply with requests for user data from the Chinese government.

Beijing relies on the country’s tech giants to help clamp down on diverse
voices. In the initial stages of the coronavirus outbreak, Tencent censored
information about the disease — a move that many argue may have limited the
Chinese public’s ability to protect themselves from the disease, which has now
killed 3,335 people in the country.

The censored Covid-19 keywords covered a wide range of topics including
factual information about the disease as well as both critical and neutral
references to how the government handled the outbreak.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is bolstered by a deep arsenal of vague
laws on which it can draw to compel companies to aid it, including its
national intelligence law, national security law, counter-terrorism law and
cyber security law.

Moreover, global tech giants have a history of handing over data to the
Chinese government. In 2005, for example, a Chinese journalist was sentenced
to 10 years in prison after Yahoo allegedly helped the Chinese authorities to
track him down.

In recent weeks, the growing privacy woes surrounding the US video-
conferencing platform Zoom have illustrated heightened concerns western
countries have over the exposure of their data to China.

In the same week that researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab
revealed that Zoom was transmitting keys for encrypting and decrypting global
meetings to servers in Beijing, groups including Nasa, SpaceX, the Taiwanese
government and the New York City public school system all banned the use of
the service.

The UN says that partnering with western platforms such as Google Hangouts or
Facebook is not a viable option for its 75th anniversary, since the Communist
Party blocks these services in China and the UN wants to reach as many people
as possible. But conceding to a censorship barrier and opting for a partner
known to stifle debate feels at odds with the event’s premise of a “global
dialogue”.

Perhaps none of this may be of concern to an eager citizen of the world who
wants to help mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations by sharing their
views on climate change or gender equality.

But international co-operation is fundamentally political. Last month, the UN
became embroiled in Chinese politics when a top official at the World Health
Organization, a UN agency, was asked by a journalist about Taiwan’s WHO
membership.

Taiwan has been praised by international experts for how its handling of the
coronavirus outbreak has saved lives, but China, which claims Taiwan as part
of its territory, has previously demanded that the UN exclude it from the
World Health Organization on the grounds that it is not an independent state.

The official first refused to answer the journalist’s question, then appeared
to hang up on the video call. It could be a portent of things to come.

