DJI, the world’s largest drone manufacturer, and dozens of other Chinese companies have been blacklisted as economic entities by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
As previously reported by Reuters, dozens of Chinese companies are being blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce, including Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC).
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Friday criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s “omnipresent surveillance to suppress citizens in Xinjiang and elsewhere.
The Commerce Department blacklisted four companies, including DJI, AGCU Scientech, China National Scientific Instruments and Materials, and Kuang-Chi Group. The company said its “genetic collection, surveillance and face recognition technologies are being used on a large scale to violate human rights in China, and the four are even exporting their products and technologies to other countries that are suppressing their people, which is contrary to the foreign policy of the United States.
The four Chinese companies did not immediately respond Friday.
The U.S. government has previously expressed concerns about DJI and other Chinese drone makers. In January, the U.S. Department of the Interior said it had grounded about 800 of its Chinese-made drones, and earlier halted Interior Department purchases of such drones.
In May 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security alerted U.S. companies that Chinese-made drones were feared to pose a risk to company data.
Separately, U.S. lawmakers resolved this month not to ban U.S. companies from buying Chinese drone technology.
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