Marion Smith is executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
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. “The projects include not only security cameras but also video analytics hubs, intelligent monitoring systems, big data centers, police checkpoints, and even drones,” Charles Rollet wrote in June in Foreign Policy.
Beijing has deployed the system to try to control the predominantly M
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