WASHINGTON -- US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday warned Silicon Valley not to bolster China's "Orwellian" state, two days before the world's two largest economies sign a partial trade deal.
Speaking to a tech-heavy crowd in San Francisco, Pompeo trumpeted the "phase one" deal to tame a two-year trade war but told businesses that they needed to do more.
"We need to make sure American technology doesn't power a truly Orwellian surveillance state. We need to make sure American principles aren't sacrificed for prosperity," Pompeo said at the Commonwealth Club.
He said he was not discouraging firms from heading to China, insisting that the Trump administration wants "American companies to get rich doing business there."
"At the same time, we need to make sure that our companies don't do deals that strengthen our competitor's military or tighten their regime's grip of repression in parts of that country," he said.
Rights advocates have voiced growing concern about China's use of technology to develop intrusive electronic surveillance.
In the tightly controlled western region of Xinjiang, where experts say more than one million mostly Muslim people are incarcerated, China is said to be fine-tuning technology that will allow security forces to quickly identify anyone and give details about their movements and background.
"Ask yourselves just a few questions -- who am I dealing with? What's the true risk/return calculus to doing business in China?" Pompeo said.
Trump is set to sign the partial deal on Wednesday after prolonged feuding, dropping new tariffs that were set to take effect on Chinese electronic products and cutting in half those imposed on September 1 on $120 billion worth of products.
The White House has said the agreement includes improvements on Beijing's requirements that foreign companies transfer technology -- which the United States say is a pretext for rampant intellectual theft.
The Trump administration says that the accord will also give US companies better access to the Chinese market for financial services and require China to buy more US products.
"We will do our part in the government. We will keep ramping up our enforcement," Pompeo said.
"But defending freedom and national security isn't just the government's job. It's one for each and every citizen," he told the tech companies.
Agence France-Presse
TOKYO - Chinese companies have exported artificial intelligence surveillance technology to more than 60 countries including Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others with dismal human rights records, according to a report by a US think tank.
With the technology involving facial recognition systems that the Communist Party uses to crack down on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China's far western Xinjiang region, the report calls Beijing a global driver of "authoritarian tech."
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released the report amid concerns that authoritarian regimes would use the technology to boost their power and data could be sent back to China.
"Technology linked to Chinese companies -- particularly Huawei, Hikvision, Dahua and ZTE -- supply AI surveillance technology in 63 countries, 36 of which have signed onto China's Belt and Road Initiative," it said.
Critics say the BRI, President Xi Jinping's signature cross-border infrastructure project, is intended to draw countries in Asia, Africa and Europe deeper into Beijing's economic orbit.
Huawei Technologies Co., a leader in next-generation 5G wireless networks, alone is responsible for providing AI surveillance technology to at least 50 countries, according to the report.
"Chinese product pitches are often accompanied by soft loans to encourage governments to purchase their equipment," it said. "This raises troubling questions about the extent to which the Chinese government is subsidizing the purchase of advanced repressive technology."
China has come under international condemnation in the wake of an investigative report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the country's surveillance and predictive-policing system to oppress Uyghurs and send them to internment camps.
The ICIJ, citing internal Communist Party documents, revealed classified Chinese government directives that guided the sweeping crackdown.
Besides Chinese companies, Japan's NEC Corp. supplies AI surveillance technology to 14 countries and IBM Corp. of the United States does so in 11 countries, according to the Carnegie report.
"Other companies based in liberal democracies -- France, Germany, Israel, Japan -- are also playing important roles in proliferating this technology," it said.
But such countries "are not taking adequate steps to monitor and control the spread of sophisticated technologies linked to a range of violations," it said.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
