Several Uyghur human-rights organizations have asked employees of Dahua, a Chinese video surveillance firm involved in mass atrocities, to step down, and for the company’s various business partners — which include some big-name companies like Amazon, Costco, and Walmart — to “decouple” from it.
“We write to urge that you decouple from Dahua. Dahua is actively, knowingly harming the safety and well-being of millions,” the groups wrote, in an open letter addressed last week to dozens of recipients and shared with National Review. The Uyghur organizations involved in this campaign include the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the Uyghur American Association, and the Campaign for Uyghurs.
While it’s the Chinese Communist Party that is carrying out a campaign to destroy Uyghurs — recognized by the U.S. and other countries as a genocide — numerous companies, including those with deep ties in Western countries, have played a leading role in assisting that effort.
Dahua in particular is one of the worst offenders, as it has provided video surveillance equipment to the authorities in Xinjiang as they have built up a 21st-century open-air prison in the far western region.
The U.N. human-rights office, in a noteworthy report this year, recognized “what has been alleged to be a sophisticated, large scale and systematized surveillance system in practice, implemented across the entire region both online and offline.” The report, which found reasonable basis to assess that Beijing might be carrying out crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, also said: “Available descriptions suggest that this system has been developed in partnership with private security and technology companies which supply the requisite technology, including for in-person and electronic monitoring in the form of biometric data collection, including iris scans and facial imagery.”
Dahua has one of the surveillance industry’s largest market shares and a robust international presence. However, in recent years the U.S. has slapped Dahua with various sanctions and penalties in light of reports that it plays a key role in Beijing’s repression. The firm has been added to a list of U.S.-designated Chinese military companies, an investment blacklist, the Commerce Department’s export blacklist, as well as a prohibition on purchases of Dahua equipment by federal agencies and the company’s involvement in federal contracting work.
Yet Dahua counts several major international partners, including major companies like Amazon and other players in the tech space. Amazon Web Services, which recently won a Pentagon cloud-computing contract, also hosts a streaming platform through which Dahua customers can view their video feeds remotely — a business arrangement that might violate a legal ban on federal contractors’ relationships with Chinese military companies.
The Uyghur groups wrote to three Dahua executives at the firm’s U.S. subsidiary: CEO Tim Wang, director of sales Greg Cortina, and director of marketing Tim Shen. They also wrote to Wayne Hurd, the vice president of sales for North America, who is based in Canada.
After National Review requested comment directly from each of the four executives, Dahua Technology USA’s media team issued a statement, saying, “We understand and respect the rights of some NGOs to express their opinions.” It went on to claim that Dahua is “not owned or controlled by any government” and a “private business” that follows the laws of each country in which it operates. The statement continued:
Like all technology companies, we recognize that we are limited in our ability to control how our end-user customers deploy our products, but we strive to reduce the risk of ours being used for unethical or illegal purposes. That includes our commitment to not develop or market products that target a specific group based on ethnicity, race or national origin.
Those claims, however, are undercut by reports that Dahua did just that — developing cameras that can recognize specific races and alert law enforcement when Uyghurs are found — as well as the fact that it is partly state-owned.
“Dahua is not simply a passive supplier that ‘does not control how its technology is used,’ contrary to what you might have been told,” the letter stated. “As the CCP sketched its plan to destroy millions of lives, Dahua held the pen.”