“WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering limits to a Chinese video surveillance giant’s ability to buy American technology, people familiar with the matter said, the latest attempt to counter Beijing’s global economic ambitions.
The move would effectively place the company, Hikvision, on a United States blacklist. It also would mark the first time the Trump administration punished a Chinese company for its role in the surveillance and mass detention of Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority.
The move is also likely to inflame the tensions that have escalated in President Trump’s renewed trade war with Chinese leaders. The president, in the span of two weeks, has raised tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, threatened to tax all imports and taken steps to cripple the Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei. China has promised to retaliate against American industries.
Hikvision is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance products and is central to China’s ambitions to be the top global exporter of surveillance systems. The Commerce Department may require that American companies obtain government approval to supply components to Hikvision, limiting the company’s access to technology that helps power its equipment.”
David Lindsay Jr.
Hamden, CT | NYT Commets
Thank you Ana Swanson and Edward Wong. My god this is complicated. I confess I liked comments which appeared on the surface at least, to disagree with each other. We need to try and help the oppressed Uighurs of Xinjiang. But are tariffs the best way to do it, or do tariffs bite us as well as the Chinese? We need to play hard balll with China, but are tariffs the right tool? Was there anything in th TPP, (the Trans Pacific Partnership) tool bag for its members to help the Uighurs? Please write more about this complexity. Does our trade war with China help or hurt our need to reduce world green house gases dramatically in the next ten years? I would like to hear from world famous economists as well as Sinophiles.
David Lindsay Jr. is the author of “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction of Eighteenth Century Vietnam” and blogs about the environment at TheTaySonRebellion.com and InconvenientNews.wordpress.com.
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