Data decoupling is about hiding your stuff from CCP spies while you continue to do business in an environment controlled by the Chinese Communist Party with companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s about taking special actions to protect your own or your company’s or your country’s information from a totalitarian regime with which in other important respects you voluntarily cooperate.
This is “data decoupling” (Financial Times, May 19, 2026):
Morgan Stanley has given its entire Hong Kong investment banking team special devices to use in mainland China….
Earlier this year the Wall Street bank gave an iPhone and an iPad to its 300-plus Hong Kong-based staff, according to five people with knowledge of the matter. These devices have limited functionality, offering only access to work emails and online meeting apps.
While some US companies have given their US-based executives so-called burner phones to travel to China, it is not common for their Hong Kong-based counterparts to do the same….
Morgan Stanley’s move is an example of how US banks are taking steps to entirely separate their data systems in mainland China from those used in the rest of the world, including Hong Kong, as data decoupling between the US and China shifts from a theoretical threat into an operational reality….
Both China and the US have established walls around their domestic data pools over the past years, treating the flow of data across borders as a national security vulnerability.
For U.S. companies to engage in “data decoupling” is better than nothing.
Now decouple for real. Stop operating the People’s Republic of China.
