The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has issued the following press release:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Feb. 3, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) released a groundbreaking report assessing U.S. companies’ ties to Beijing’s human rights abuses, the surveillance state, and China’s military modernization.
The report was authored by Horizon Advisory, a strategic consultancy focused on the assessment of geopolitical, technological, and economic change, with contributions and peer review by VOC Director and Senior Fellow in China Studies Dr. Adrian Zenz. The full report is available here.
The US private sector increasingly finds itself at the heart of US-China geopolitical tension. In their endeavor to capture Chinese markets and boost their bottom lines, American corporations have increasingly supported Beijing’s military modernization, surveillance state, domestic securitization, and attendant human rights violations. As a result of this growing dependency, some corporations engage in political lobbying in the US in ways that ultimately serves Beijing’s interests while potentially undermining the values and principles that undergird the western democratic order.
The authors of VOC’s report reviewed eight well-known firms—Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook, GE, Google, Intel, and Microsoft— for potentially problematic linkages that may directly or indirectly support China’s state surveillance, military modernization, and human rights violations.
This research does not assume that doing business in China is inherently wrong. However, support for Beijing’s military modernization, surveillance state, and human rights violations may contradict professed corporate ethics, mislead consumers, and risk violating relevant laws in the US and elsewhere. Overall, this project aims to inspire the development of new best practices for US industry. Rather than merely condemning the US private sector, the report develops a grading scorecard system in order to incentivize corporations to equally promote freedoms and rights everywhere.
In addition to grading American corporations’ ties to Beijing, today, one day before the 2022 Winter Olympics are set to begin in Beijing, VOC is calling out the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for awarding the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing despite clear evidence of China’s ongoing human rights abuses, for failing to fulfill its human rights obligations, and for refusing to engage substantively with human rights organizations regarding forced labor of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang Region.