Opinion: Data Security Becomes a Core Issue for Doing Business in China

As many people know, China is now a major digital economy. By the end of 2020, almost a billion people had access to the internet in China. WeChat, China’s largest social media platform, surpassed 1.2 billion monthly active users in 2020, and Douyin, the Chinese twin of TikTok, now has over 600 million daily active users. Meanwhile, over 700 million monthly users now visit e-commerce platform Pinduoduo. Alibaba-affiliated Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay — the domestic e-payments giants that pioneered new payment technologies using QR codes — currently process about 95% of the digital payments market in China.