Buying Stock in These Chinese Companies Makes You Complicit in Terror on Uighurs

EXCERPT

Does your retirement plan or investment portfolio undermine human rights in China? For millions of Americans, the answer is yes. They unwittingly hold or benefit from investments in companies that enable the Chinese Communist Party’s oppression and imprisonment of the Uighur people.

Consider two Chinese firms, Hikvision and Dahua Technology. They supply about one-third of the world’s security cameras, but in their home country, both companies have received government contracts — totaling more than $1 billion — to install a vast surveillance apparatus in the western province of Xinjiang.

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Beijing has deployed the system to try to control the predominantly Muslim Uighurs, viewed by the Communist Party as a threat to its power in that region. The surveillance equipment helps authorities identify supposedly dangerous individuals, many of whom are then shipped to reeducation camps that Beijing calls “vocational training centers.” Of a total population of about 11 million, 2 million Uighurs may have been thus imprisoned, according to the World Uighur Congress.

In these camps, Uighurs are subjected to torture and brainwashing intended to eradicate their culture and force them to embrace communist ideology. The Post’s editorial board has decried this “massive campaign of cultural extermination.”

At the time of publishing, Marion Smith was executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Originally published in The Washington Post.