The State Department has also linked Tencent and Alibaba to the regime’s build-up of “technology-facilitated surveillance and social control”:
Significantly, the modern “China Model” is built upon a foundation of technology-facilitated surveillance and social control. These techniques for ruling China have been – and continue to be – in critical ways developed, built, and maintained on behalf of the Party-State by technology firms such as Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, Alibaba, and Baidu. As these companies export their products and services to the rest of the world, the security and human rights problems associated with this “China Model” are progressively exported with them.
They “have no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party “no” if officials decide to ask for their assistance – e.g., in the form of access to foreign technologies, access to foreign networks, useful information about foreign commercial counterparties, insight into patterns of foreign commerce, or specific information about the profiles, activity, or locations of foreign users of Chinese-hosted or -facilitated social media, computer or smartphone applications, or telecommunications,” the report adds.
Financial disclosures also reveal that Sherrill’s spouse retains up to a $50,000 investment in iShares MSCI China Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that appear to have been purchased in 2019. Sherrill also has up $15,000 invested in the ETF, which is comprised primarily of Alibaba and Tencent shares in addition to state-owned entities such as China Construction Bank.
Sherrill introduced the Election Technology Research Act of 2019 which authorized robust evaluations and changes to U.S. election infrastructure.
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