[Biden administration calls the sanction part of
broad effort to unite democracies against authoritarian states]
The sanction adds the facial
recognition company SenseTime to a list of 59 Chinese companies in which U.S.
citizens and entities are prohibited from investing. The Biden administration
widened that list this summer to include firms that it said support China’s military and state
surveillance, building on a Trump administration effort.
The Biden administration announced
the move alongside new sanctions on individuals it said were
responsible for repression and human rights abuses in Bangladesh, Myanmar and
North Korea. It also announced a partnership with other democracies to tighten
export controls on technology that can be used for repression.
The measures “send a message that
democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the
state to inflict suffering and repression,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally
Adeyemo said in a statement.
The Treasury Department, which
oversees the investment prohibition list, said SenseTime “has developed facial
recognition programs that can determine a target’s ethnicity, with a particular
focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs,” a persecuted Muslim minority population
in China.
It added that China has used
digital surveillance technology to track Uyghurs’ movements and activities and
to “create a police state in the Xinjiang region.”
In an email, SenseTime spokeswoman
June Jin said the company “strongly” opposes “the designation and the
accusations that have been made in connection with it.”
“The accusations are unfounded and
reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of our company,” Jin wrote. “We regret
to have been caught in the middle of geopolitical disputes.”
[Biden
bans investment in Chinese companies linked to surveillance technology]
Scholars estimate that Chinese
authorities have detained more than 1 million Uyghurs in centers and reeducation
camps for periods ranging from weeks to years. The United States has labeled
the campaign a genocide. The United Kingdom pressed China in
January to allow United Nations rights inspectors to visit the region, while the European Parliament has condemned China for using forced labor in
Xinjiang.
The sanction against SenseTime will
complicate its preparations to list its company shares on the
Hong Kong Stock Exchange through an initial public offering.
SenseTime is one of China’s
largest artificial
intelligence companies, pairing cameras and software algorithms for
uses that include identity verification and monitoring whether a driver is
drowsy or distracted.
The Trump administration began
raising alarms about the company in 2019, adding it to an official export blacklist for what the administration called
its support of China’s surveillance of Uyghurs and other minority groups in
Xinjiang.
That blacklist, called the Entity
List, requires U.S. companies to receive a government license before exporting
technology to the targeted companies.
The new sanction adds SenseTime to
the separate Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List, which prohibits U.S. individuals from buying or
selling any publicly traded securities in the companies. Existing investors
have one year to divest after a company is placed on the list.
In 2018, several U.S. venture
capital funds invested in SenseTime, including Tiger Global Management
and Glade Brook Capital Partners, according to market data provider Pitchbook.
Those investors did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
[Who
are the Uyghurs and what is happening to them in China?]
SenseTime joins two other Chinese
companies, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Huawei Technologies,
already included on the prohibited investment list for allegedly aiding
repressive state surveillance.
The Washington Post reported last year that Huawei had tested facial
recognition software that could send automated “Uyghur alarms” to government
authorities when camera systems identified members of the oppressed minority
group. Huawei at the time said the work was “simply a test and it has not seen
real-world application.”
Cameras made by Hikvision have been
deployed throughout Xinjiang to monitor Uyghurs in internment camps, according to the Uyghur Human Rights
Project, an advocacy group based in Washington.
The Treasury Department also added
two Chinese Communist Party officials from the Xinjiang region, Shohrat Zakir
and Erken Tuniyaz, to a sanctions list for their role in “serious human rights
abuse.” Zakir was chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region until 2021.
Tuniyaz now serves as the acting chairman.
“During their tenures, more than
one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority
groups have been detained in Xinjiang,” the Treasury Department statement
said.
The Biden administration on Friday
was wrapping up a two-day “Summit for Democracy,” a virtual gathering aimed at
rallying the democracies of the world against the forces of authoritarianism.
As the summit came to a close, the
White House said the United States and seven allied democracies have agreed to
develop a voluntary nonbinding code of conduct “to use export control tools to
prevent the proliferation of software and other technologies used to enable
serious human rights abuses.”
The other participating countries
are Australia, Denmark, Norway, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom, according to a brief statement on the agreement.
