Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2666 actions· ✨ 90 recent

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), enacted as Division H of P.L. 118-50 (21st Century Peace through Strength Act), prohibits app stores and internet hosting services from distributing, maintaining, or updating "foreign adversary controlled applications" — defined explicitly to include ByteDance Ltd and its subsidiaries (TikTok). ByteDance was given 270 days from enactment (until January 19, 2025) to execute a "qualified divestiture" — selling TikTok to an owner with no operational relationship with a foreign adversary — or face a nationwide distribution ban. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law's constitutionality in TikTok, Inc. v. Garland (January 17, 2025), rejecting First Amendment challenges and affirming the national-security rationale grounded in data-collection concerns.

The Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国个人信息保护法 — PIPL) was adopted at the 30th meeting of the 13th NPC Standing Committee on 20 August 2021 and entered into force on 1 November 2021, constituting the third and final pillar of China's cybersecurity and data-governance regulatory trinity alongside the Cybersecurity Law (2016) and the Data Security Law (2021). The PIPL is China's comprehensive personal-information statute establishing consent-based and necessity-based legal bases for PI processing, a tiered cross-border personal-data transfer regime (CAC security assessment / PI protection certification / Standard Contractual Clauses), extraterritorial application (Art. 3) to non-Chinese controllers offering services to or analysing the behaviour of PRC residents, and a heightened protection regime for sensitive personal information and data of minors under 14. It mandates data-protection impact assessments, personal-information-protection-officer obligations at designated handlers, breach notification, and a full suite of data-subject rights including access, rectification, deletion, portability, objection, and automated- decision-making opt-out. Article 53 requires overseas controllers to establish a domestic representative or designated entity in China, providing a domestic enforcement counterparty.

The Data Security Law of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国数据安全法) was adopted at the 29th meeting of the 13th NPC Standing Committee on 10 June 2021 and entered into force on 1 September 2021, constituting the second pillar of China's cybersecurity and data-governance regulatory trinity alongside the Cybersecurity Law (2016) and the Personal Information Protection Law (2021). The DSL establishes a tiered data-classification regime — "important data" and "national core data" — with escalating security obligations including risk assessment, risk monitoring, breach reporting, and classified-protection requirements for data handlers. It introduces a data-export security review for "important data" generated or collected within China, the statutory parent authority operationalised by the 2024 CAC Cross-Border Data Flow Provisions, and enacts a §36 blocking statute prohibiting Chinese organisations and individuals from transferring data stored in China to foreign judicial or law-enforcement authorities without prior PRC government approval.

The Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China (中华人民共和国网络安全法) was adopted at the 24th meeting of the 12th NPC Standing Committee on 7 November 2016 and entered into force on 1 June 2017, establishing the foundational legal framework for network security governance across all sectors. The law creates the Critical Information Infrastructure Operator (CIIO) designation and protection regime administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), mandates data localisation for personal information and important data collected or generated by CIIOs in China, and establishes cross-border data-transfer security assessment requirements under Article 37 — the provision later operationalised by DSL 2021, PIPL 2021, and the 2024 CAC Cross-Border Data Flow Provisions. The CSL introduced multi-level protection scheme (等级保护制度 / MLPS) obligations for all network operators and network-product/service security-review procedures, under which CAC triggered the cybersecurity review of Didi Global in 2021 and the exclusion of Micron's products from Chinese critical-infrastructure projects in 2023.