The U.S. government is sanctioning 28 Chinese entities for involvement in the suppression of the Uighur people of China’s Xinjaing province, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Targets of the action include video-surveillance and facial-recognition giants Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Megvii Technology Inc. and SenseTime Group Ltd. The decision by the Commerce Department to add the firms to its “entity list” alongside telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co.—which was added in May—means suppliers will be barred from providing technology that originates in the U.S. to the Chinese firms without a license.
The newly identified entities “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups” in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, the Commerce Department said.
China’s Ministry of State Security.has implemented a far-reaching regime of social control to assimilate the Uighurs, including re-education, mass surveillance, and dismantling mosques.
Azeem Ibrahim, analyst for the independent Center for Global Policy, says:
This is not a haphazard effort to contain a potentially rebellious borderland minority. It is a systematic use of cultural reprogramming based on an ostensibly scientific “theory of social stability,” in the words of some of the architects of the anti-Uighur program.
The new sanctions, announced on the eve of the stalled tariff negotiations between the two countries, seem more designed to pressure China to make trade concessions than to encourage respect for human rights.
Source: U.S. Adds Chinese Firms to Blacklist, Citing Repression of Muslim Minorities – WSJ
