Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) describes the cases as ‘a tragic example of the real-life implications of a U.S. company producing technology for the CCP.’
WASHINGTON—Two prominent Republican lawmakers are calling on the Trump administration to side with a lawsuit accusing Cisco of aiding a brutal persecution in China.
In a letter dated Oct. 29, Reps. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who respectively lead the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the House Select Committee on Chinese Communist Party, urged the administration to press the Supreme Court so the case could go to trial.
Practitioners of Falun Gong filed the case in 2011, alleging that the California tech giant has contributed in no small part to designing and building China’s vast surveillance network, exacerbating the sweeping eradication campaign that the regime launched against the faith group in 1999.
The resulting product is Golden Shield, a platform accessible nationwide in China that allows the regime to identify and monitor Falun Gong practitioners in real time, enabling their arrest and torture, the plaintiffs said. According to the complaint, the system also keeps detailed profiles of suspected and known Falun Gong practitioners, including their location, family members, and contacts.
The spiritual discipline Falun Gong features the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It attracted somewhere between 70 million to 100 million practitioners in the 1990s. In the nationwide persecution, many have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting.
“The allegation that an American tech company custom-designed a tool to facilitate the violent persecution of a religious minority by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a serious one. We believe the plaintiffs deserve the chance to prove their claims,” the lawmakers wrote to the chief U.S. Supreme Court litigator, D. John Sauer.
Sauer represents the U.S. government position in cases before the Supreme Court, which is reviewing a challenge from Cisco seeking to dismiss the case. The Supreme Court has sought the views from Sauer, who will file a brief by early next year.
Smith and Moolenaar said Cisco’s argument that the litigation harms U.S. foreign policy “gets things entirely backwards.”
“Members of Congress have been clear that American companies must not be complicit in furthering the CCP’s human rights abuses,” they wrote, pointing to a congressional hearing in 2006 where Smith and other lawmakers questioned a Cisco executive over the role of its technology in aiding abuses.
One Cisco marketing PowerPoint, leaked in 2008, showed the company pitching the Golden Shield Project for monitoring public network information security, with one priority being to “combat ‘Falun Gong.’”
By Eva Fu
