Chinese people living abroad in the United States are determined to bypass the upcoming ban on WeChat, saying losing access to the messaging app would be like “cutting off their limbs.”

WeChat users will not be able to make payments or transfer funds to those living in the U.S. from Sunday, after the U.S.Commerce Department announced the ban on Friday.

Overseas Chinese businessmen and students living in the U.S. said the ban would seriously impact their lives, and being unable to use it would be the same as “cutting off their limbs.”

Su Jun moved from Tianjin in northeastern China to Chicago in 2001 and said he used the app to keep in touch with friends and family back home. He checks the app more than 100 times a day to scroll through his friends' news feeds.

“I even met my wife through WeChat,” the 30-year-old said.

Su said he was worried that he would not be able to upgrade the app in the future to make video calls or send audio messages to friends. He planned to use a virtual private network or VPN — which allows users to bypass location-based restrictions by redirecting internet traffic to another country — to continue using the app after the ban.

“Chinese people are very flexible and smart, we’ll find a new way out soon,” Su said.

There were more than 19 million daily active users of WeChat in the U.S. in the past three months, including Chinese-Americans, Chinese people on short-term visits and Americans doing business with Chinese firms, according to analytics firm Apptopia. WeChat claims to have more than 1 billion users worldwide.

After hearing news of the ban, one Chinese student studying in New Jersey said she had revived her old account on messaging app QQ so she would not lose touch with her family and friends. QQ, created in the late 1990s, was China’s most popular messaging app before WeChat was launched in 2011. It is owned by Tencent, the same parent company that owns WeChat. The student, who only gave her surname as Wu, said she had also downloaded DingTalk, a messaging app developed by e-commerce giant Alibaba that has 200 million individual registered users.

Wang Nan, a clothing merchant in Zhejiang province who works with Chinese designers and brands based in New York, said all of their business including daily exchanges with clients and transactions, were all made through WeChat.

“It would be annoying to have to use WeChat through VPN a few hundred times a day,” said Wang Nan.

Click here for Chinese version

---------------------------------

Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE

To download the latest version,

iOS: bit.ly/AD_iOS

Android: bit.ly/AD_android

Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play