Business | Information overlords

China’s data-security laws rattle Western business executives

Authorities go after foreign companies for hazily defined data transgressions

|Shanghai

AS CHRISTOPHER WAS preparing to board a flight from New York to Singapore in February 2019, he was pulled aside by local authorities and told to stay put. An Interpol “red notice”, a request for local law enforcement to make an arrest on behalf of another government, had been issued on his name, he would soon learn. The executive, who has asked that his real name not be used because his case is ongoing, was the founder of an international advertising group that a few years earlier had got into big trouble in China over data security.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Information overlords”

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