US Will Put 8 Chinese Companies On Investment Blacklist For Alleged Uyghur Surveillance

The U.S. Treasury Department will ban American investors from buying shares in eight Chinese companies linked to alleged surveillance of Uyghur Muslims.

The Treasury Department will add the companies, which includes popular drone manufacturer DJI, to its list of “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” on Thursday, The Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. Investors are barred from engaging in “the purchase or sale of publicly traded securities” or derivatives of companies on the list, according to President Joe Biden’s June executive order establishing the investment blacklist.

Other than DJI, the companies to be added to the list include facial recognition technology companies CloudWalk Technology and Megvii, the FT reported. The Treasury Department added another facial recognition firm SenseTime to the blacklist on Friday, which initially planned to go public but postponed its IPO in response.

All eight blacklisted companies are already on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which imposes export restrictions on covered firms, including bans on certain U.S. technology being shipped to the companies.

The investment blacklist will reportedly include drone maker DJI, which was linked to surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in 2020 by a Bloomberg report that found Chinese authorities in the Uyghur province of Xinjiang had contracted with the company. The Commerce Department placed DJI on its Entity List in December 2020, alleging the drone manufacturer “enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China” through “high-technology surveillance.”

The decision to blacklist the firms follows the approval of a bill Tuesday banning imports from the Xinjiang province of China, with certain exceptions.

The blacklisted companies also include cybersecurity firm Xiamen Meiya Pico, artificial intelligence company Yitu Technology and cloud service firms Leon Technology and NetPosa Technologies, according to the FT.

The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.