Biden administration officials and senior lawmakers plan to scrutinize U.S. corporations like Amazon that do business with Chinese technology companies, as Beijing’s human rights abuses stoke controversy over partnerships in that sector.
At issue is the challenge of economic entanglements between the world’s two largest economies, weighed against outrage over Chinese government efforts to use technology to control the mainland population and steal strategic advantages in an intensifying rivalry with Washington. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s team is still developing a plan for managing those challenges, but U.S. lawmakers are growing impatient with American economic titans who disregard China’s atrocities against the Uighur Muslims.
“It will be part of the review I mentioned as we determine how best to defend ourselves, but also to promote our interests and to promote our values in the context of that bilateral relationship more broadly,” State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters at the State Department during Thursday’s briefing.
“Last year, Amazon entered into a deal reportedly worth $10 million to buy 1,500 cameras from Dahua Technology,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, wrote in a Feb. 10 letter reminding Amazon founder Jeff Bezos that Commerce Department officials have blacklisted Dahua for its involvement in the Uighur repression.
“If these allegations against Dahua are true, it would mean that Amazon willfully ignored guidance from the United States government and purchased equipment from an entity-listed company that is complicit in China’s atrocities against the Uighurs,” Menendez wrote, in a letter also signed by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Bezos is no stranger to tensions with the U.S. government in recent years, as former President Donald Trump blamed the Amazon owner for stories published by the Washington Post, a publication Bezos owns. The letter from Rubio and Menendez suggests that the expiration of Trump’s presidency won’t end the friction but rather root the disputes in Beijing’s human rights abuses rather than domestic political concerns.
“While buying equipment from Dahua Technology is not illegal, it does raise several questions for you as Chief Executive of Amazon,” the senators wrote.
An effective effort to sever such corporate links could require additional laws and federal regulations, according to a leading China analyst who favors establishing a “dedicated intelligence unit” to identify the offending Chinese entities.
“We don’t want our companies doing business with human rights abusers,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Dan Blumenthal explained. “We don’t have enough good information” to ban such activity “we can’t make good policy.”
Price’s comments, for his part, echoed the Trump administration’s misgivings about China using business relationships with American companies to gain illicit access to sensitive information.
“We certainly understand and have some of the same profound concerns with China’s predatory behavior when it comes to technology,” he said.
Chinese officials have warned the United States not to criticize Beijing over the abuse of Uighur Muslims, on the grounds that these policies are an “internal” matter and thus a “red line” for the communist regime. State Department officials have flouted that prohibition, and President Biden raised such issues Wednesday in his first phone call with Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping.
