(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Chinese military companies have spent more than $24 million lobbying the American government since 2020.
A review of lobbying disclosures by the Daily Caller News Foundation revealed that some of the biggest spenders on lobbying included corporations directly tied to human rights abuses and Chinese military research. Among those companies were telecom giant Huawei, facial recognition software developer Megvii and genomics company BGI Shenzhen.
Chinese military corporations were lobbying the House, Senate and various parts of the executive branch, including the president’s office, often trying to be involved in policies that would impact their U.S. operations, the Daily Caller’s review of congressional disclosures and legislative records indicated.
Chinese military companies are entities that are “directly or indirectly owned, controlled or beneficially owned by” the Chinese military as well as those that were identified as “military-civil fusion contributor[s] to the Chinese defense industrial base” by the Department of Defense, the federal law stated.
Corporations that collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to develop military technology, organizations that have contracts with the government to produce munitions and any entity defined as a “defense enterprise” by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China belong to the latter category.
Disclosures showed that among those companies was telecom giant Huawei, which was included on the Pentagon’s initial list of Chinese military companies in 2020 and spent more than $10.8 million lobbying since then, more than any other entity flagged by the DOD.
BGI, which spent just under half a million dollars on lobbying between 2023 and 2024, is the world’s largest genomics company that is on the DOD’s list of Chinese military companies, the news source reported.
Among other Chinese military companies lobbying the federal government were also those that were linked to human rights abuses, such as DJJ, a drone manufacturer, and Megvii Technology Group, which produces artificial intelligence and facial recognition software that is used to conduct surveillance activities on ethnic minorities in China, according to the Department of Treasury.
