There's the fact that anything hosted within China can be altered by the great firewall of China for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government. Like when the Chinese government used the great firewall to slip malware into the Baidu analytics javascript for every visitor outside of China to every website that used Baidu whether located inside or outside of China to stage a DDoS attack on github. All because github dared to host open source projects that let mainland Chinese read the New York Times uncensored. Given documented activities like this, is it possible to trust anything that passes through the great firewall of China?

"is it possible to trust anything that passes through the great firewall of China?"?

You do realize that your comments above just past through GFW and I am reading it on the other side of the GFW? To answer your question, no, I don't trust what you said.

You don't have to 'trust' my comment. China using the great firewall to infect Baidu javascript to attack github is a well-documented fact. You can even view the infected Baidu javascript designed to attack GreatFire and cn-nytimes projects on github archived on github itself here: https://github.com/BenMQ/cbjs-baidu-github-attack

Happily the Chinese government let the Baidu javascript work as intended for Chinese users, it was only for international users that they converted it into malware. Bottom line, don't load any javascript file hosted in mainland China.

If the the US government forced all traffic through a single firewall and used said firewall to infect Google Analytics javascript files on third party websites to force international users to unwittingly engage in a DDoS against a Chinese site that was hosting open source code designed to allow US citizens to get around the 'great US firewall', I'd be advising folks against trusting Google Analytics and US-hosted javascript the way I advise them against trusting Baidu analytics and China-hosted javascript now.

It's not an isolation as Americans are free to chose to use Alipay, WeChat or whatever any other service available on open net, as opposed to China where you can't use Google, Facebook and many other services even if you'd like to, unless you cheat GFW by using VPN. Most people outside of China don't use Alipay/WeChat just because there are many local payment providers that are easier to deal legally in case something goes wrong.

then you tell me how Alipay is a national security threat to the US according to US lawmakers.

https://www.ft.com/content/193bbffc-38af-11e7-821a-6027b8a20...

please don't bother mentioning the minority stake from CIIC, if that is a national security threat to the US, then all successful Chinese firms have the same issue.

As stated above, anything hosted within mainland China can be weaponized by the great firewall of China and used for DDoS and other malware attacks like China did against github.

You forgot to mention the wannacry attack with the tool that can be traced back to NSA.

I don't recall the NSA attempting to weaponize my personal PC when I browsed a website using malware javascript served via a commercial analytics network to attack an open source project the way the Chinese government did. Comparing that to a tool developed by a random nefarious actor using an exploit the NSA had on file is just the tiniest bit of a stretch.

I'm not familiar enough with this situation as I'm not American myself and can't open your link (it's paywalled), but I'm sure Americans are still free to use Alipay despite lawmakers like it or not. That's the key difference from China, where you can't even access facts the ruling party doesn't like [0].

0. https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-03/how-china-has-censore...

That article is paywalled, but finding another article, it looks like the concern is specifically on Alipay taking over Moneygram? (http://www.pymnts.com/news/regulation/2017/u-s-lawmakers-war...) Further Googling says that some of the concern is that Moneygram is in heavy use in military bases (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447669/moneygram-ant-fi...).

(It is worth noting that these remarks came in the middle of a bidding war between Ant and Euronet (https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/euronet-alibaba-ant-financ...). Take the situation however you want...)

Either way, other articles (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/9/15595338/alipay-us-expansi...) point out that Alipay has a presence in the United States... the concern seemed pretty specific, and not really like the wholesale blocking of major American (and other) sites that China engages in.

Using that logic, Chinese should cite national security concerns and ban Intel processor, Apple devices or simply anything comes with a US made/designed chip from all those so called "sensitive" government departments. Oh, let's don't forget US made airplanes, still remember the spy bugs placed on the airplane suppose to be used by the former Chinese president? Sounds like a national security threat to me.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

Some do, some don't. Such is the nature of choice.

No, US lawmakers have been actively trying to stop Alipay from having any meaningful presence in the US. They called it a national security threat. It is all over the news.

https://www.ft.com/content/193bbffc-38af-11e7-821a-6027b8a20...

You can probably read some news about Alipay approaching US retailers recently, that is all about 1) providing services to Chinese tourists visiting US, 2) serving Chinese online customers purchasing US products online.