Senators Introduce Bill to Bar Blacklisted Chinese Companies From US Capital Markets

People arrive to attend the Huawei keynote address at the IFA 2020 Special Edition consumer electronics and appliances trade fair on the fair's opening day in Berlin, Germany, on Sept. 3, 2020. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) on Oct. 27 introduced a bill that would ban blacklisted Chinese companies and their affiliates from accessing U.S. capital markets.

The legislation, known as the American Financial Markets Integrity and Security Act, aims to counter the “financial ambition” of Chinese companies listed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List or the Defense Department’s list of Communist Chinese military companies. If passed, the measure would prohibit those companies from being listed or traded on U.S. exchanges, and would also bar American investors, including insurance companies and retirement funds, from investing in them.

In September, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) added 47 new entities to its Entity List for acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States. The BIS list strategically targets China’s telecom technology giant Huawei, whose activities in recent years have raised national security concerns and motivated an international coalition to exclude it from their 5G communications infrastructure.

The Defense Department’s list currently includes 31 Chinese companies that the Pentagon says are controlled or backed by the People’s Liberation Army, most notably Hikvision, a surveillance equipment manufacturer accused of contributing to human rights violations in China by helping its communist regime construct a nationwide mass-surveillance network.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s exploitation of U.S. capital markets is a clear and ongoing risk to U.S. economic and national security that must be addressed,” Rubio said, adding that there are “a number of Chinese companies” operating in U.S. capital markets that are actively advancing the regime’s overseas interests.

“The American Financial Markets Integrity and Security Act will ban these companies from operating in U.S. capital markets and make clear to the Communist Party that they will no longer be able to exploit our financial system,” he said.

“Some of these Chinese companies are using slave labor through religious persecution to get ahead,” Braun said. “These bad actors should have no role in the American marketplace.”

The Chinese communist regime is particularly notorious for utilizing prisoners of conscience, of which two of the largest groups are Falun Gong practitioners and Muslim Uyghurs, as a source of free or low-cost slave labor.