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...