(CBS NEWS) Washington — The Biden administration added 14 Chinese companies to a trade blacklist on Friday over their alleged role in that country’s abuses of its Uighur civilians and other Muslim ethnic minorities.
The Commerce Department said in a statement that the electronics and technology firms and other businesses helped enable “Beijing’s campaign of repression, mass detention and high-technology surveillance” against Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province.
The penalties, which prohibit Americans from selling equipment or other goods to the firms, are the latest from the United States as it steps up financial and trade penalties over China’s treatment of the Uyghur people.
The Chinese government since 2017 has detained a million or more people in the northwest province of Xinjiang. Critics accuse China of operating forced labor camps and carrying out torture and forced sterilization there as it allegedly seeks to assimilate Muslim ethnic minority groups.
In early January, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. tweeted outlandish claims that such policies “emancipated” Uighur women and freed them from serving as “baby-making machines.” Twitter labelled the tweet as violating its rules and subsequently removed it.