A police patrol walk in front of the Id Kah Mosque in the old city of Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, on 22 March 2017. File photo/Reuters/Thomas Peter
By David Shepardson and Diane Bartz | Reuters
WASHINGTON, DC, 20 July 2020
The US Commerce Department on Monday added 11 Chinese companies implicated in what it called human rights violations in connection with China’s treatment of its Uyghurs in Xinjiang in western China to the US economic blacklist.
The department said the companies were involved in using forced labour by Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups. They include numerous textile companies and two firms the government said were conducting genetic analyses used to further the repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
Blacklisted firms cannot buy components from US companies without US government approval.
It was the third group of companies and institutions in China added to the US blacklist, after two rounds in which the Trump administration cited 37 entities it said were involved in China’s repression in Xinjiang.
“Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labour and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington declined to comment.
In May the Chinese Foreign Ministry criticized US entity list additions, arguing the United States “overstretched the concept of national security, abused export control measures, violated the basic norms governing international relations, interfered in China’s internal affairs.”
The companies added to the blacklist include Nanchang O-Film Tech, a supplier for Apple’s iPhone, which hosted Apple chief executive Tim Cook in December 2017, according to O-Film’s website. It is also a supplier to Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft, according to an April congressional letter. The US companies did not immediately comment.
The list includes two subsidiaries of Beijing Genomics Institute, a genomics company with ties to the Chinese government, Senator Marco Rubio said.
He said the additions will “ensure that US technology does not aid the Chinese Communist Party’s crimes against humanity and egregious human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, including the forced collection of DNA.”
Also added are KTK Group Co, which produces more than 2,000 products used to build high-speed trains, from electronics to seats; and Tanyuan Technology Co, which assembles high thermal conductive graphite reinforced aluminum composites.
Another company is Changji Esquel Textile Co, which Esquel Group launched in 2009. Esquel Group produces clothing for Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Hugo Boss.
In a letter to Ross on Monday, Esquel Chief Executive John Chen asked its unit be removed from the list. “Esquel does not use forced labour, and we never will use forced labour. We absolutely and categorically oppose forced labour,” Chen wrote.
Efforts to reach other companies in China for comment were unsuccessful outside of normal business hours.
Also on the blacklist is Hetian Haolin Hair Accessories Co. On 1 May, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said it was halting imports of the company’s hair products, citing evidence of forced labour.
On 1 July, CBP seized in Newark a shipment of almost 13 tons of hair products worth over $800,000 with human hair that it said originated in Xinjiang.
Commerce previously added 20 Chinese public security bureaus and companies including video surveillance firm Hikvision, as well as leaders in facial recognition technology SenseTime Group Ltd and Megvii Technology in connection with China’s treatment of Muslim minorities.
The world cannot stand silent spectators of the horrors that is committed by communist China on hapless people of Tibet and East Turkistan. The killings, the disappearances of people has been going on for the last six decades. Monasteries and mosques erased, forced sterilisation of women, concentration camps of million people are egregiously committed by the CCP. How can a responsible member of the UN permanent member commit such heinous crimes against it’s own people?
Is this a responsible act by a member of the UN? Doesn’t China have the responsibility to uphold international law which defines the legal responsibilities of States in their conduct with each other and their treatment of individuals within their borders? Does it not even respect that laws enacted by the UN itself?
China should be taken to the International Court of Justice like former Yugoslavia and Rawanda to try its leaders for the crimes committed against the Tibetan and Uyghur people. It’s time the self respecting Governments of the world unite to expose the Chinese regimes crimes and made to pay for their crimes like any other criminal from Africa to the Balkans.
At the least, all nations who believe in human rights and dignity must boycott Xi, the monster and not allow him to step on their soil.
This goes to show communist China is a rogue nation and should be stripped of its UN permanent membership status. It has not lived up to the expectations of the International community and has continuously trampled on the UN charter of human rights and treated its own citizens with abject contempt by committing genocide.
It must not be allowed to hide behind a smoke screen of “China’s internal affairs” and commit heinous crimes such as extermination of ethnic groups who oppose them.