US Blacklists 37 Companies, Including China’s BGI, Inspur

In an attempt to intensify tensions with Beijing, the Biden administration has added 37 businesses to a trade.

Commerce Department oversees export control and has added BGI Tech Solutions (Hongkong) to its BGI Research team. This was in response to allegations that these units could pose threats. “significant risk” support the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance.

“The actions of these entities concerning the collection and analysis of genetic data present a significant risk of diversion to China’s military programs,” You said it.

Reuters had previously reported that BGI collected genetic data on millions of females for broad research into the population traits and collaborated with the Chinese military.

BGI also included Forensics Genomics International as a subsidiary in forensics.

Inspur was accused by the Commerce Department of trying to obtain and purchasing U.S. products to help support CCP’s efforts to modernize its military forces.

Both the companies and Washington’s Chinese Embassy did not respond immediately to our requests for comment.

Commerce added 26 other Chinese entities to the list—which makes it hard for targeted companies to receive shipments of U.S. goods from suppliers.

Commerce also added entities that Commerce believed were providing or trying to provide Iran with sanctions. Commerce also included three companies in Russia, Belarus and Taiwan which Commerce claimed were helping to support Russia’s military.

The group also attacked companies in China, Burma, (also called Myanmar), for human rights violations, as well as companies from Pakistan and China for their involvement in ballistic missile programmes of concern.

“When we identify entities that pose a national security or foreign policy concern for the United States, we add them to the Entity List to ensure we can scrutinize their transactions,” Thea Kendler, Assistant Commerce Secretary, stated in a statement.

Washington and Beijing are locked in a long-running technology war.

Tensions were particularly high following the downing by the Biden Administration last month of a Chinese spy plane that had traversed a large area in the United States.

“We cannot allow our adversaries to misuse and abuse technology to commit human rights abuses and other acts of oppression,” Matthew Axelrod, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement ”That’s why we’re committed to preventing bad actors from siphoning off our technology. We will take an all-tools approach to combat this threat.”

Two units of BGI Group (the world’s biggest genomics company) were added to the Commerce Department’s economic blacklist by the Commerce Department in 2020 due to allegations that it performed genetic analyses to aid the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghur minorities.

Beijing denied any wrongdoing. BGI at the time denied any wrongdoing.

By Alexandra Alper and David Shepardson