Intel CEO Doubles Down on Xinjiang Apology: ‘No Reason to Call Out One Region in Particular’

I ntel CEO Pat Gelsinger on Monday defended his company’s decision to backtrack after initially asking suppliers to avoid sourcing components from China’s Xinjiang region, where Beijing carries out systematic forced-labor abuses. During a webinar event hosted by the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Center, Gelsinger said there’s no reason to specify Xinjiang-specific forced-labor abusees in Intel’s notifications to suppliers because there are similar problems all over the world.

“We found that there was no reason for us to call out one region in particular anywhere in the world because there’s many regions in the world that are having issues of such a matter,” Gelsinger said, explaining that Intel sourcing agreements with its global suppliers include provisions on forced labor, slavery, and other issues. Those provisions, he said, already applied globally.

“We simply revised the policy. The policy hasn’t changed. We did revise it to not include any one particular region in the world,” Gelsinger said during this morning’s webinar. He also specified that Intel “never had” sourced materials from Xinjiang.

The flare-up over Intel’s forced-labor statement began last month after President Biden signed into law the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. That legislation bars the import of goods from Xinjiang, where the State Department determined that the Chinese Communist Party is carrying out crimes against humanity, including forced labor, against ethnic minority populations. State also determined that China is perpetrating genocide — that there is a “systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”

Soon after Biden signed the act, Intel said in a supplier letter: “Multiple governments have imposed restrictions on products sourced from the Xinjiang region. Therefore, Intel is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.”

That sparked an uproar in China, including an editorial by the Global Times, a party tabloid, criticizing the move as “arrogant and vicious.” So Intel posted an apology to Chinese social-media platforms on December 23. “We apologize for the trouble caused to our respected Chinese customers, partners, and the public,” the statement read.

Then, earlier this morning, before Gelsinger’s latest comments, the Wall Street Journal reported that Intel removed the entirety of the paragraph on Xinjiang from the supplier letter posted to its website. The language on Xinjiang was taken down sometime between December 23 and today.

The chipmaker’s stance on forced labor in Xinjiang touches on a range of other thorny issues that has put it in congressional crosshairs.

Most prominent among these is Intel’s corporate sponsorship of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which the U.S. and a number of other countries are boycotting in some form over the Chinese Communist Party’s mass atrocities. Although Intel general counsel Steven Rodgers told a congressional panel last year that his firm agrees with the State Department’s Uyghur genocide determination and has urged the International Olympic Committee to move the games and respect human rights, Intel faces criticism from human-rights groups for its continued support of the games.

Meanwhile, Gelsinger also doubled down on Intel’s move to add to its government-affairs advisory committee Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang. The Chinese tech executive has extensive ties to Beijing’s military-civilian fusion system and united front political influence network, as National Review reported last year.

“They’ve navigated well their position as a global company that happens to be headquartered in Beijing. I deeply respect YY. He’s been a friend, a business leader, one of the most successful leaders worldwide, and I needed someone on the government-affairs advisory committee for us who represented that view,” Gelsinger said in response to a question posed by NR, referring to Yang by his initials.

Although Gelsinger lauded Lenovo’s global acquisitions, including of IBM’s PC hardware business, multiple government agencies have sounded the alarm about cybersecurity risks posed by Lenovo products. In 2018, a report submitted to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted that Yang was educated at an institution run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has “a history of coordinating with the Chinese military, including its cyber and electronic warfare operations.”

Gelsinger added that the eight-member committee includes U.S. and European leaders such as the Atlantic Council’s Fred Kempe.“It’s not a governance role,” he said. “It’s an advisory role in that regard.”

Intel is walking a tightrope between the U.S. and China, as Washington sets out to disrupt and punish the party’s ongoing mass atrocities and crack down on Chinese military-civil fusion efforts. Accordingly, Gelsinger has portrayed his firm as part of the solution to a massive chip shortage and U.S. efforts to shore up our supply-chain vulnerabilities. He’s not willing to alienate the Chinese market, though. As the Intel chief told the Atlantic Council crowd, “We’re going to do everything on both tthe Chinese side as well as on the U.S. side to continue to find ways that companies can do business effectively in the largest growing market in the world, as well as meet the rest of the U.S. and Western requirements.”

That might come at the cost of Intel’s reputation in the U.S. and of the massive subsidies for semiconductor production that Congress is mulling over as part of its consideration of a China-focused industrial policy package.