Communist Party (CCP)-directed tech companies, like ByteDance, Alibaba, Hikvision, Dahua, Tiandy, and BGI, provide the technological equipment used by the CCP to commit genocide against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). Further troubling is the fact that these companies’ products are being used by other authoritarian regimes. To hold these companies responsible for their human rights abuses, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and U.S. Representative August Pfluger (R-TX) introduced the Uyghur Human Rights Sanctions Review Act. The bill would require the U.S. Department of the Treasury to immediately make sanctions determinations for Hikvision, Dahua, Tiandy, and BGI. First introduced in December 2022, the bill would require the Office of Foreign Assets Control, in consultation with the U.S. Departments of State and Justice, to determine within 30 days of enactment whether Chinese tech companies have committed, or been complicit in, human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other groups in XUAR.

Representative Pfluger: “The United States should not enable Chinese surveillance companies that help the Chinese Communist Party track and monitor dissidents, harvest genomic data, and torture ethnic and religious minorities. I am proud to work with Senator Rubio to introduce a bill that makes it clear that American companies will not be complicit in these atrocious human rights violations.”

Senator Rubio: “Let there be no doubt that the CCP remains a direct threat to our national security interests and to a free and open Indo-Pacific. Whether it’s the CCP’s lack of transparency on the origins of COVID-19 or their absurd claims over the South and East China Seas, this genocidal regime knows no limits. We must wake up and counter Beijing’s dangerous coercion.”

Full text of the bill available here. Learn more about this issue in a report authored by Craig Singleton,  who serves as the China Program Deputy Director and Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.