Nanchang O-film Tech, whose tech helps power phones, tablets and wearables, is accused by the U.S. Department of Commerce of human rights abuses for helping China’s campaign against Uighurs. The company is listed as a supplier or undefined “partner” with Apple, among others.
Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labor and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens. This action will ensure that our goods and technologies are not used in the Chinese Communist Party’s despicable offensive against defenseless Muslim minority populations. – U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, July 20, 2020
The US Department of Commerce added 11 Chinese companies to its list of firms implicated in human rights violations, including China’s reported campaign against Muslim minority groups from an area of the country known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. At least one of those companies, Nanchang O-Film Tech, is listed as a supplier or undefined “partner” with nearly two dozen tech and car companies, including Amazon, Apple, Dell, GM and Microsoft.
The Commerce Department said the group of 11 companies that supported “mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, involuntary collection of biometric data and genetic analysis” targeted at Uighurs and other minority groups will face restrictions on US products, including technology.
The government’s move against O-Film, which says it makes cameras, touchscreens and fingerprint sensors, marks an escalation of the Trump administration’s use of tech companies as part of its pressure campaign against the Chinese government… The Commerce Department said that since October 2019, it’s named 48 companies it says are “engaged or enabling” the Chinese government’s repression of Uighurs.
MacDailyNews Note: O-film Tech Company Limited is listed on Apple’s 2019 Supplier Responsibility report’s Supplier List here.
“Apple CEO Tim Cook, winner of the Human Rights Campaign’s 2015 Visibility Award”and who currently wishes he were invisible. Hypocrite.
This is simple election year grandstanding. This is by an administration whose leader gave his explicit support for concentration camps for these very same people. If true, Apple will take the necessary steps to change vendors or their practices.
MDN/CCP China censorship check
The problem with Supplier Responsibility reports is that it partially relies on companies to self-report… and since Chinese companies have a primary responsibility to be beholden to the government… and a secondary to an American vendor company… well, things work differently.
Americans sometimes feel like companies are separate entities with freedom and that that is normal for companies to have autonomy. However, remember that in China… companies are not treat as separate entities… they are all extensions of the government… requiring a CCP party member as an advisor when over a certain size.
China, Hong Kong
US, Portland
Putin, Anywhere in Russia til 2036
Trumpet, however out in 15 weeks….