In a 2018 report titled "The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism," China was identified as the "worst abuser" of internet freedom by Freedom House, a bipartisan nonprofit focused on promoting democracy. "One of the things that makes [China] distinct is that tech there is designed to meet the standards of government needs," said Samantha Hoffman, a senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), an independent research group. "There is a type of cooperation between companies that is on the face normal but abnormal in a political context," Hoffman told ESPN. In 2019, Hoffman's group issued a series of reports that linked Megvii, SenseTime and other tech firms to the abuses in Xinjiang. Citing Chinese documents and government reports, the research group said Megvii worked in cooperation with security services, including one instance in which its facial recognition software was used to trigger a "Uyghur alarm" that could be sent to police. SenseTime, the group concluded, relies on the "largesse of the party-state, particularly its investment in two government projects linked to public security surveillance as well as the surveillance state in Xinjiang that have benefited from an estimated $7.2 billion worth of investment in the past two years." Also in 2019, The New York Times and Human Rights Watch both reported that Megvii and SenseTime were among companies that built algorithms enabling the government to track the Uyghur population. Last December, the U.S. Treasury Department added Megvii, SenseTime and six other Chinese companies to a separate blacklist that prohibits Americans from holding stock in those firms. A department spokesman accused the companies of "actively cooperating with the government's efforts to repress members of ethnic and religious minority groups."
‘Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai is the face of NBA's uneasy China relationship’, ESPN
