India Bans Chinese Baidu Search, Weibo in Second Round of Tech Purges, Reports Suggest

According to the Times of India news outlet citing sources, the Chinese equivalents of Google search and Twitter were among the 47 additional apps banned late last month.

The government has notified Google and Apple that they should remove those applications from the app stores and directed internet service providers to block their use on Indian territory, the news outlet reported citing a government source.

In late June India banned 59 Chinese-developed applications from use in India after tensions between the Asian giants came to a head over Himalayan border disputes.

The renewed list of banned apps mainly targeted clones of previously banned ones, but with the bans Baidu Search and Weibo, India’s tech marketplace has been all but purged of Chinese made products.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had around 200,000 followers on microblogging app Weibo before he deleted it over the escalating tensions, the Times of India reported.

The border dispute between the two countries, which has effectively never been settled, took a turn for the worse when Chinese and Indian soldiers faced off in the desolate Ladakh region. India said that 20 soldiers where killed in face-to-face combat (firearms are banned from the border as a confidence-building measure) while China has not disclosed its losses in that skirmish.