The West is embracing a Chinese company that surveils Uyghur camps

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Hikvision, a video surveillance manufacturer that the Chinese government has a controlling stake in, has been facing criticism and roadblocks to doing business in several countries, including the US where government agencies are banned from purchasing its products.

The pushback appears to have more to do with politics - since Hikvision has been named as the Chinese government's supplier in the Xinjiang region, which is home to the Uyghur minority - rather than with concerns over mass surveillance per se; the tone in media reports in the West is that the chief problem is the company that sells this tech, rather than its widespread use.

But, after all, if countries outside of China didn't provide it with such a huge market, Hikvision, and the Chinese state that's behind it, would not represent it in this sense. However, the market is there and growing: according to reports, Hikvision's global annual revenue is now close to $12 billion.

What with China's de facto status as an adversary, and China's human rights record, the problem of mass surveillance in the West gets compounded when it turns out that the same authorities that are heavily criticizing Beijing for its actions and treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, happen to also be Hikvision's big customers.

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