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By Shan Li | Photographs by Mengwen Cao for The Wall Street Journal 

The Trump administration's plans to restrict the Chinese messaging app WeChat could have a casualty beyond geopolitics: It would cut off a vital link Americans use to keep in touch with family in China.

WeChat, owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., has more than 1.2 billion users world-wide and is known in China as the do-everything app where consumers, companies and governments go to communicate, make payments, do business and more.

Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order barring "any transaction that is related to WeChat" by Americans, effective in late September. The order left details of what will actually be banned to the Commerce Department, and U.S. companies have been saying the plan could undermine their competitiveness.

Meanwhile, many Chinese-Americans and Chinese expats, along with firms doing business with Chinese clients, say they depend on WeChat to connect with people both in China and Chinese communities in the U.S. Other popular platforms such as Google, Facebook and WhatsApp are banned in China, and more-obscure messaging apps such as Signal aren't widely used.

WeChat has 19 million daily active users in the U.S., according to app-data provider Apptopia.

Angela Zhou, 28 years old, said she checks WeChat every day. She belongs to a few groups, including one with her extended family in China and another with her parents' former neighbors in Fujian province.

"It means a lot," said Ms. Zhou, a registration manager at a sports facility in Stamford, Conn. "Otherwise I would have no social media to connect with them. They are not on Facebook or anything like that."

Ms. Zhou said her father, who lives in Connecticut and is the only sibling in his family to leave China, uses the app daily to call old friends or one of his sisters. Her parents also like to send snapshots of their day-to-day lives, she said, such as photos of their vegetable garden.

"They say, 'I gotta share with my WeChat group,'" Ms. Zhou said. "The group will respond, 'Oh, can you mail those cucumbers to China?'"

Her family has yet to figure out a good alternative to WeChat, she said. "My dad was joking that he would buy phone cards again, like back in the day."

The Trump administration has said the app raises national security concerns related to privacy and censorship. WeChat's owner, Tencent, has said it protects users' privacy and manages content according to laws in the countries where it operates.

Technology analysts and lawyers said that Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google may be forced to remove WeChat from their app stores. A second executive order targeting the short-video app TikTok has pushed its Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., to look for a buyer for its U.S. business. On Friday, Mr. Trump set a deadline of 90 days for ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok's U.S. operations.

Sarah Su, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who works in social media, said losing access to WeChat will leave her looking for another way to talk with her family in California.

"My parents' communities are on WeChat, so it's just easier to use it to keep in touch," Ms. Su said.

She said WeChat is her only link to family members in China. Even though she can't read Chinese, the app's translation function allows her to keep up to date on one cousin's brewery business, another's job in fashion, and posts from her aunt and uncle about their dog.

"It makes me feel connected," Ms. Su added.

Her mom has found WeChat invaluable for making friends in the Bay Area and finding social events to attend.

"For immigrant parents, it can be a pretty lonely experience sometimes in the States," Ms. Su said. "My mom, especially, she's found a lot of community over WeChat."

Many small American businesses, especially Asian restaurants, have come to rely on WeChat as an ordering tool that is more important than delivery services such as Seamless, Postmates or Deliveroo.

Kung Fu Steamer, a Chinese eatery in Brooklyn, gets about 60% of its business through WeChat, said manager Jina Zhou. It's the primary platform for bulk orders from individual customers and businesses.

"A WeChat ban would have a big impact on us," Ms. Zhou said.

She said the eatery briefly considered rigging up an ordering system on Facebook but has chosen a wait-and-see approach for now. "Is this for real?" she asked.

In China, WeChat users say they, too, are anxious about losing the way they keep up with loved ones in the U.S.

"Getting my dad to figure out how to use WeChat was a very, very painful process," said Tom Nunlist, a Shanghai-based policy analyst.

Mr. Nunlist, 32, said he mailed a Chinese-made phone to his father in Cincinnati specifically for WeChat. Then he coached him for months on how to use the app, sometimes with a brother standing by to help in person.

"He mastered it too well," he said. "He just kind of blows up my phone."

If WeChat is banned, alternative communication apps such as Telegram require a virtual private network to work in China, which isn't always reliable, he said. It would also require retraining his dad.

With the coronavirus pandemic leading to closed borders and canceled flights, Mr. Nunlist said it has truly hit home this year that he is thousands of miles away from family.

"The ease of communication and ease of travel has given me a false sense of 'I don't live on another continent,'" Mr. Nunlist said. "A WeChat ban once again underlines this distance."

Write to Shan Li at shan.li@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 16, 2020 10:35 ET (14:35 GMT)

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