US imposes visa restrictions on employees of Chinese firms

DHARAMSALA. 16 July: The US has announced that it will impose visa restrictions on employees of Chinese technology firms on Wednesday.

“State Department will impose visa restrictions on certain employees of Chinese tech companies like Huawei, that provide material support to regimes engaging in human rights violations and abuses globally,” CNBC quoted the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as saying in its report.

Huawei is “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang and the indentured servitude of its population shipped all over China,” the top US diplomat has stated in the report.

Pompeo has declared in the report that several employees of the Chinese multinational technology company  are providing “material support to the Chinese Communist Party regime that commits human rights abuses.” 

He has however stopped short of disclosing the identities of the employees or how many people would be affected by the restrictions.

According to the report, Huawei has expressed its “disappointment” as it described the move “unfair and arbitrary action,” declaring that it “operates independent of the Chinese government” and is a “private, employee-owned firm.”

 The US Secretary of state who has previously described Chinese state-backed businesses including Huawei as “trojan horses for Chinese intelligence” has further stated in the report that the decision should serve as a warning for other tech companies. 

Huawei made it to the US’ economic blacklist in May 2019 after the Trump administration banned US companies from doing any trading with it owing to the threat it poses to the US’ national security and IP (intellectual property) theft, allegations Huawei has repeatedly denied.

Huawei is said to have close links with the Chinese military, as its founder Ren Zhengfei was a former officer at the People’s Liberation Army, besides selling cell phones, it also sells equipment that is part of the global roll-out of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks which experts say could be used for undetected surveillance or intelligence gathering by the communist regime.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *