US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday asked corporate America to think twice when doing business in China’s Xinjiang region, where he appeared to liken the scale of mass incarceration of Muslims to Nazi abuses.
Speaking to a business group, Pompeo stopped short of asking firms not to work with China, but said that he hoped to spark further discussion on the “enormous risk” of doing business in the country.
“We watch the massive human rights violations in Xinjiang, where over a million people are being held in a humanitarian crisis that is the scale of what took place in the 1930s,” Pompeo said.
“And we see American businesses and their technology being used to help facilitate that activity from the Chinese government. It’s something worthy of thinking about,” Pompeo said as he received an award from Business Executives for National Security.
“I don’t know the answer,” he said, adding that as a business owner and a conservative Republican he opposes government interference in commerce.
Pompeo’s remarks came as US software titan Microsoft faces scrutiny over its joint research with Chinese government-linked academics on artificial intelligence, with Beijing said to be using facial recognition technology in its crackdown in Xinjiang.
In February, US biotechnology manufacturer Thermo Fisher announced that it would stop selling equipment used to create a DNA database of the Uighur minority.
A UN panel has cited estimates that China has rounded up about 1 million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking minorities, with advocates accusing Beijing of curbing the practice of Islam.
China has said the camps are “vocational training centers” to steer people away from extremism and reintegrate them, in a region plagued by violence blamed on Uighur separatists or Muslims.
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