The U.S. Corporations Building China’s Military-Surveillance State

Some U.S. corporations doing business in China have struck a Faustian bargain to enrich themselves while helping the Chinese Communist Party enslave its population at home and threaten the U.S. and our allies around the world. Big Tech firms have transferred sensitive technology to the Chinese military, helped spread CCP propaganda, and developed the innovations that created the Chinese people’s electronic prison.

Until recently, there had been little way of collating or quantifying these egregious acts of support for the world’s most powerful totalitarian state. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — which does invaluable work educating the public about the horrors of Marxist regimes, past and present — has compiled the aid and comfort American businesses rendered to the enemy in its first-ever “Corporate Complicity Scorecard.” This report weights eight corporations — Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook, GE, Google, Intel, and Microsoft — and finds them wanting. Of those eight firms, half of them get an F, and another two get a D based on their cooperation with the Chinese government’s oppressive aims.

Some of the corporations in the report appear to be complicit, or at least willfully blind to, the persecution of  Uyghur Muslim population in China’s Xinjiang district, where government officials herd more than a million Uyghurs into an open-air gulag. In addition to claims of forced labor, there have been credible allegations that China engages in systematic rape and torture. Both Dell and GE both maintain offices in Xinjiang, despite “clear business advisories from the US State Department counseling that businesses not operate in or have supply chains dependent upon Xinjiang,” the report says.

Many Uyghurs end up in forced labor, which creates many of the components that go into Big Tech products. Western non-governmental organizations have identified 11 separate companies in Apple’s supply chain as potentially linked to slave labor programs. These companies may also benefit from child labor, the report states:

In 2019, it was reported that Amazon Alexa production facilities managed by Foxconn violated labor regulations concerning young workers. It was suggested at the time that some young workers worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, in violation of labor laws. Foxconn claimed these roles “provid[ed] students…with the opportunity to gain practical work experience.”

Not only is it possible that some U.S. corporations benefit from slave labor, but they also help their Communist slave masters monitor, surveil, and terrorize their own people. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation reveals that some of the featured corporations develop technology that the Chinese Communist Party uses to spy on its broader population. Dell runs an artificial intelligence lab in partnership with the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation (CASIA), which creates intelligent perception, biometric monitoring, and voice recognition that enables the CCP’s surveillance.

According to the report, four of these eight companies — Amazon, Dell, GE, and Microsoft — are helping to facilitate China’s creation of so-called “smart cities.” Whole cities, run by artificial intelligence, monitor public spaces around the clock. “Smart cities are a core part of both the CCP’s intrusive domestic surveillance program and that program’s global proliferation,” the report notes. China, in turn, is sharing its surveillance bounty with other anti-democratic and repressive regimes around the globe.

“Chinese companies have been involved in exports of facial recognition tech to regimes in Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Zimbabwe, and Malaysia,” wrote Justin Sherman and Robert Morgus for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.

While some violations exploit the Chinese, others threaten American lives. The report also ranks U.S. corporations’ complicity with Chinese repression based on whether they produce dual-use technology — innovations that also have a military application — or partner with companies tied to the Chinese military.

In this category, Dell has distinguished itself. The president of Dell China once said Dell “is committed to becoming the most trusted partner of Chinese enterprises.” As part of the launch of the “In China, For China” program in 2015, “Dell signed a series of cooperation agreements with Chinese military-tied entities, including China Electronics Corporation, a state-owned conglomerate that the US Department of Defense (DoD) would later identify as tied to the Chinese military, and Tsinghua Tongfang, an information technology company that was placed on the US Department of Commerce’s Entity List in 2021,” the report notes. “No public documentation found by this project suggests that any of these agreements has been terminated.”

Dell also co-authored a report on the “Made In China 2025” program, which the watchdog report explains discussed technologies that “are relevant to China’s military-civil fusion program.”

GE and Amazon’s activities similarly bestow technology on partners who may, in turn, benefit the Chinese military. GE partners with the Harbin Electric Group, a state-owned entity, which works on the development of turbine technologies; Harbin Electric Group, in turn, is part of the Chinese government’s military fusion program through a dedicated department that draws on — wait for it — turbine technology.

GE’s ties to the Chinese military through Harbin and others are “particularly troubling because GE is a major contractor for the US Department of Defense, including in technologies and products similar to those with which it partners with the Chinese military system,” the report states. This double relationship raises the possibility of technology transfers through a company in part subsidized by U.S. tax payers.

Amazon’s ties are somewhat more attenuated but still noteworthy. Amazon collaborated with the Chinese government in setting up the Zhongwei Industrial Park, which houses two other companies (China Mobile and China Unicom) tied to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The report also says corporations have used their clout to advocate for Chinese causes. Dell, it says, openly supports China’s imperialist Belt and Road Initiative. Some of these efforts may impact U.S. law, like when Apple lobbied Congress against certain provisions of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. In a stroke of brilliance, U.S. corporations that China allows to do business with its billion-person market now have a vested interest to oppose any U.S. sanctions against the nation for fear of losing this access.

Facebook illustrates the way Western corporations change their tune based on their economic ties to Beijing. Chinese pro-democracy activists took advantage of the platform to coordinate their actions, so the government blocked Facebook in 2009 and Instagram in 2014. After lobbying to get back into the Chinese market, the government gave Facebook a three-month trial period to reenter the Chinese market in 2015 and build offices in the country. This project ended up not materializing.

According to the a report cited by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Facebook had created software which could “suppress posts from news feeds within certain geographic areas.” This would be done “through a third party, likely intended to be a China-based partner.”

Despite its seeming willingness to participate in censorship, the Chinese government denied Facebook its relaunch. After it became clear that the CCP was never going to let it do business in China again, Facebook leadership began criticizing Beijing’s human rights record around 2018.

But China still finds Facebook useful for spreading its propaganda to a Western audience. Last March, Facebook allowed Chinese state media to buy an ad where the mayor of Xinjiang told Facebook users that the “peace and stability that people from all ethnic groups in Xinjiang once longed for has become a reality.” Furthermore, he called any claims of genocide against Uyghur Muslims a Western “plot.” Facebook, too, has a financial incentive to give airtime to the CCP: In 2018, China represented $5 billion in revenue, accounting for approximately 10% of all Facebook sales.

Everyone who loves freedom should be concerned by these developments. This first-ever complicity report renders a valuable service by examining each area of corporate complicity individually. For its final overall grades: Dell, GE, Intel, and Microsoft got an F. Amazon and Apple got a D. Both Google and Facebook got a B.

GE failed both “operations in Xinjiang” and “direct support to military or security state,” the only corporation with a double fail.  Dell got a failing mark for its operations in Xinjiang. Intel and Microsoft failed “direct support to military or security state.”

As this author discussed with Lee Smith, who helmed the new documentary series “China The Enemy Within,” for 50 years the U.S. bipartisan foreign policy establishment has claimed that doing business with mainland China would miraculously cause the Chinese Communist Party to embrace the full range of Western, Judeo-Christian thought: capitalism, liberal democracy, and respect for human rights. They argued that the U.S. should preemptively reward their future transformation with Most Favored Nation trade status and membership in the World Trade Organization.

Every corporation that opened offices in China, every factory transplanted from the Midwest to Jiangsu, acted as a missionary of Western values, the theory went. Instead, the CCP has been following former President Deng Xiaoping’s advice: “Hide your strength, bide your time.”

Many in Beijing believe their time has come. The CCP has become more repressive of its Uyghur Muslim, Tibetan Buddhist, and unauthorized Christian communities. It is monitoring its own population to a degree the average American would find incomprehensible. And it is saber-rattling against U.S. allies — often with technology that was Made in America.

At least now we know some of the people who are to blame.

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