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U.S. blacklists Chinese drone company, dozens of other Chinese companies

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The United States government has added the massive Chinese drone company SZ DJI Technology Co, the largest in the world, to its economic blacklist alongside a batch of about 80 other Chinese companies, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said Friday morning.

The U.S. Department of Commerce said it was adding DJI, AGCU Scientech, China National Scientific Instruments and Materials, and Kuang-Chi Group because the four companies “enabled wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance,” Fox News reports.

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The department also said in some cases the four companies had “facilitated the export of items by China that aid repressive regimes around the world, contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests,” Reuters reports.

Also being added to the list is Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China’s foremost chipmaker. Explicitly, SMIC will be barred from acquiring technology to manufacture chips with 10-nanometer circuits and smaller, Ross told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Friday morning.

“What this is all about is these are companies that are tied to the People’s Liberation Army,” said Ross.

“This has to do with is their access to very advanced semiconductor products,” he added.

Further explaining the move, Ross said the blacklist was necessary to “ensure that China, through its national champion SMIC, is not able to leverage U.S. technologies to enable indigenous advanced technology levels to support its destabilizing military activities.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin denounced the U.S. action during a Friday briefing in Beijing.

“We urge the U.S. to stop its wrongful activities cracking down on foreign companies,” he said.

Back in September, the Commerce Department placed SMIC on a different export restrictions list, saying it had conducted a review and concluded that the firm “may pose an unacceptable risk of diversion to a military end use in the People’s Republic of China,” according to Fox News.

You can follow Douglas Braff on Twitter @Douglas_P_Braff.

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Report: Beijing’s military hacked U.S. nuclear firm before Hunter Biden aided Chinese bid to acquire it

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A bombshell report by Just the News explains that “U.S. officials were acutely aware that Beijing was trying to obtain America’s premiere nuclear reactor technology, including through illicit hacking, months before Hunter Biden and his business partners sought to arrange a quiet sale of an iconic U.S. reactor company to a Chinese firm, according to court records and national security experts.”

Hunter Biden attempted to assist CEFC China Energy to acquire Westinghouse, one of America’s most famous electricity and appliance brands, as well as its state-the-art AP1000 nuclear reactor.

Hunter began his work with the Chinese company in early 2016 – while Joe Biden was the sitting Vice President – memos show. According to a copy of the indictment, just 20 months earlier, his father’s Justice Department charged five members of a Chinese military hacking unit for breaching the company’s computer systems in search of intellectual property and internal strategy communications.

Just the News reports:

In May 2014, the five operatives of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398 were charged with hacking into the systems of six U.S.-based companies across different industrial sectors, including Westinghouse Electric Co., SolarWorld, United States Steel Corp., and a union. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, called the breach a classic case of “economic espionage.”

One operative gained access to Westinghouse’s computers in 2010 and “stole proprietary and confidential technical and design specifications related to pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing” pertaining to the company’s advanced AP1000 nuclear reactor design, according to an indictment filed by the Department of Justice.

“Among other things, such specifications would enable a competitor to build a plant similar to the AP1000 without incurring significant research and development costs associated with designing similar pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing systems,” the indictment reads.

Just the News notes that while there is no evidence at the moment that Hunter Biden was aware of or involved in the hacking efforts by the Chinese, documents previously released by Congress in the Biden impeachment inquiry show Hunter Biden wrote in one text message in 2017 that he believed one of the CEFC officials he worked with, Patrick Ho, was the “f—ing spy chief” of China.

Ho was later indicted in the U.S. and charged with corruption. Joe Biden’s brother James told the FBI he believed CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming had a relationship with China’s communist president.

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