The list of names includes companies the U.S. government has identified as major security threats, including telecom titan Huawei and Megvii, a facial recognition firm that helped Huawei design a system that could spot members of China’s oppressed Uyghur minority in a crowd.
“Chinese military corporations cast a wide net across the American government, lobbying the House, Senate and various parts of the executive branch, including the office of the president, often setting their sights on proposed policies that would impact their U.S. operations,” the report from the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) found.
The definition of a “Chinese military company” was established by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), which maintains a list of entities that are either owned by various arms of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, or are involved in “military-civil fusions.”
Huawei was the biggest spender on Washington lobbyists, with over $10.8 million in outlays since 2020. This is unsurprising not only because of Huawei’s vast size, with nearly $100 billion in annual revenue, but because Huawei has been battling against U.S. legislation that would sharply limit the sale of its products.
As DCNF noted, Huawei won quite a few of those battles after paying big money for the services of high-powered, heavily-connected lobbying firms like the Podesta Group. Huawei has a subsidiary called Futurewei that also reportedly spent millions on lobbyists, and also saw the defeat of legislation that would have harmed its interests.