U.S. blacklists Chinese tech firms, agencies, over Uighur mistreatment as trade talks resume

On Monday, the U.S. and China resumed high-level trade talks in Washington after a two-month hiatus and the U.S. blacklisted 28 Chinese organizations, barring them from buying goods from U.S. companies without government permission. The addition of the 28 local government agencies and tech companies to the Commerce Department's Entity List, combined with skeptical comments from China and President Trump, dimmed the prospects for a breakthrough in the U.S-China trade war, Reuters reports.

The Commerce Department said the 28 blacklisted agencies and companies "have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups." China has detained an estimated 1 million Uighurs in Xinjiang province and placed them in prison-like "vocational training centers."

The blacklisted government agencies are in Xinjiang and the tech companies include Hikvision, one of the world's largest surveillance equipment manufacturers, and other surveillance and facial-recognition software firms.

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The trade negotiations kicked off Monday, but Vice Premier Liu He will meet with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer starting Thursday for high-level negotiations. Tariffs on Chinese imports are scheduled rise again next week. Trump said Monday that "there's a chance we could do something very substantial," but he would "much prefer a big deal."