Patterico's Pontifications

5/5/2022

Biden Administration Considering Sanctioning Chinese Firm Which Was Going to Hire Barbara Boxer as a Lobbyist

Filed under: General — JVW @ 9:44 am



[guest post by JVW]

Reported yesterday:

The Biden administration is weighing a move to place sanctions on the Chinese video surveillance firm Hikvision, the Financial Times reported. The move would result in the first designation of a major Chinese tech firm under the Global Magnitsky Act.

The Commerce Department had previously added Hikvision to its export-control blacklist in 2020, over its role in constructing the mass surveillance apparatus used to surveil ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. The video-surveillance trade group IPVM recently published an interview with a Kyrgyz survivor of the Xinjiang camp system alleging that he saw Hikvision-branded cameras in his cell.

Then, last year, the White House designated Hikvision under its Chinese military companies list, which barred U.S. nationals from investing in the company.

The expected move to designate Hikvision under the Global Magnitsky Act will result in its addition to the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals List, blocking the company’s assets and prohibiting Americans from doing business with it.

I bring up this story because it pertains to a post I wrote almost sixteen months ago, regarding the Trump Administration’s eleventh-hour designation of Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur community as genocide:

So now how does the incoming administration respond? There is little doubt that China will complain about this last-second move and will furiously lobby behind the scenes for it to be rescinded (they tried to hire retired United States Senator Barbara Boxer to work on behalf of the firm who supplies the surveillance equipment used in the internment campus and throughout Xinjiang, but backlash against her registering as a foreign agent for the Chinese Communist Party led her to rather testily pull out of the arrangement). [. . .]

This is just a reminder of what an execrable Senator and truly awful person Barbara Boxer was and is. Unfortunately, not only was her successor no better in office, but she has also been more successful in rising to the top of the Democrat Party sewer. But I suppose the retired Senator can find other work representing the interests of the brutal butchers who run the People’s Republic of China, perhaps as an emissary to Apple, Disney, or the NBA.

– JVW


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