U.S. blacklists Chinese drone maker, seven others over ties to Uyghur repression

The U.S. Treasury Department placed eight Chinese companies on an investment blacklist Thursday for their technological support for Beijing’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims.

The eight firms were linked to biometric surveillance and tracking in Xinjiang, where the Chinese Communist Party has been systematically repressing Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities. The companies were first sanctioned under a June presidential order designed to prevent American securities and investments from financing the Chinese military.

One of the companies blacklisted, SZ DJI Technology Co. Ltd., is the world’s leading manufacturer of commercial drones, commanding a massive 77 percent of the consumer drone market in 2020. Others include cloud computing firms and facial recognition companies that operate in Xinjiang.

“Today’s action highlights how private firms in China’s defense and surveillance technology sectors are actively cooperating with the government’s efforts to repress members of ethnic and religious minority groups,” said Brian E. Nelson, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “Treasury remains committed to ensuring that the U.S. financial system and American investors are not supporting these activities.”

This investment blacklist differs from the Department of Commerce’s “entity list” that Chinese telecom giant Huawei was added to in 2019, which bars the export of U.S.-made components to the companies on it. Being placed on either list does not also ban the sale of its products in the U.S.

DJI was already on Commerce’s entity list and continues to sell consumer drones in the U.S. It was added last year for enabling “wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance.”