Hunter Biden Still Has a Stake in Chinese Firm With Human Rights Abuse Sanctions

The former vice president and 2020 Democratic nominee, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has a stake in a Chinese surveillance company that’s under US sanctions for human rights violations, exposing his father’s campaign promise to crack down on American businesses with financial ties to China’s humanitarian abuses.  His own son is involved, so how much do you think he would do anything?

An equity firm that Hunter has Bohai a stake in, Harvest RST Shanghai Equity, originally invested in Megvii, a sanctioned Chinese tech firm that specializes in facial recognition software, Face++, in 2017, according to the company’s website. The company holds a nearly 2 % stake in Megvii through two holding companies, in line with a prospectus filed by Megvii as part of its application for a listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange last year.

The U.S. Department of Commerce last year added Megvii to its list of sanctioned entities that have been “implicated in human-rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s crusade of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups.”

Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings have been a degree of conflict all through his father’s campaign.  Ethics watchdog groups have raised concerns about Hunter Biden’s sweetheart  gig with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings as Joe Biden was overseeing Ukraine policy with respect to stopping political corruption as vice president.  Hunter Biden has additionally faced criticism for partnering with the state-run Bank of China to launch a Chinese investment firm. However, for this instance, Hunter Biden’s business deals are not simply representative of nepotism or a conflict of interest, no, Joe Biden has promised to go after companies like the very one his son is invested in!  And you just know that’s never ever ever going to happen.

Back in July, Biden promised that he would “prohibit US companies from inciting repression and supporting the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state.”`  His son got a $15 billion deal from the Chinese government-owned Bank of China.  Just how much do you think Joe would look the other way?  Last week, the Biden campaign called China’s assault on the Uighurs “genocide” and called on President Donald Trump to “take action.”  More projectionism on the part of the Democrats, as the Biden crime family is involved hip deep in the very things Joe Biden is calling out on the carpet.  It takes a lot of chutzpah to do that.

Hunter Biden stepped down from the board of Bohai Harvest RST, which he co-owned, earlier this year to avoid problems for his father’s run for the presidency, but he nevertheless still owns a 10 % stake in the investment firm via his US-based limited liability company Skaneateles LLC, according to corporate records from China’s official company database. Hunter Biden’s continued funding in the firm was previously reported by the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner.

Whereas Hunter Biden has no legal obligation to divest from the comapny, human-rights activists stated foreign investors are basically aiding Chinese persecution of the minority Uighur population by financing firms which have been implicated in human-rights abuses.

Ryan Barry, project coordinator with the World Uyghur Congress, said US investors “absolutely” have an ethical obligation to divest from companies linked to China’s persecution of the Uighurs.

“If you invest in these companies, you’re profiting off the suffering of the Uighur people,” he said. “It’s unethical to do this.”

Communist Chinese surveillance and facial recognition companies play a vital role in the government’s oppression of ethnic minorities, says Peter Irwin, senior program officer with the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

“Surveillance is central,” Irwin said. “Chinese surveillance companies have been totally enabling the Chinese government to do what it’s doing.”

“Where Megvii and these facial recognition companies come in is they analyze the data and they spit out some sort of algorithm” to determine whether or not people under surveillance should be detained, Irwin said. He continued saying that the Chinese government has been systematically focusing on Uighurs via a program of high-tech surveillance, reeducation and forced labor camps, and other repressive security measures.  And the Left in this country had a brain aneurysm over Trump keeping illegal alien children in cages, which he didn’t, but the previous administration did.

Megvii denied any involvement with state security, and last summer Human Rights Watch retracted part of a report that revealed it found supply code evidence that links Megvii to police surveillance technology used against the Uighurs.

However, months later, the US Department of Commerce added Megvii to its watchlist of designated entities for “enabling activities contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States,” particularly on human-rights violations.