Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill – who spearheads House Democrat’s election reform initiatives – is invested in several companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and its military, The National Pulse can reveal.
The New Jersey congresswoman’s 2020 financial disclosure reveal investments in several Chinese tach firms flagged as “tools” of the Chinese Communist Party. She retains up to $50,000 in Alibaba shares and purchased up to $15,000 in Tencent shares on March 27th, 2019.
The U.S. State Department has flagged both firms as “tools” of the Chinese Communist Party that count powerful party members among their executive ranks.
Both companies have also been involved in the “research, production, and repair of weapons and equipment for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)” and have a “deep record of cooperation and collaboration” with China’s “state security bureaucracy,” former Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford revealed.
The State Department has also linked Tencent and Alibaba to the regime’s build-up of “technology-facilitated surveillance and social control”:
Significantly, the modern “China Model” is built upon a foundation of technology-facilitated surveillance and social control. These techniques for ruling China have been – and continue to be – in critical ways developed, built, and maintained on behalf of the Party-State by technology firms such as Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, Alibaba, and Baidu. As these companies export their products and services to the rest of the world, the security and human rights problems associated with this “China Model” are progressively exported with them.
They “have no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party “no” if officials decide to ask for their assistance – e.g., in the form of access to foreign technologies, access to foreign networks, useful information about foreign commercial counterparties, insight into patterns of foreign commerce, or specific information about the profiles, activity, or locations of foreign users of Chinese-hosted or -facilitated social media, computer or smartphone applications, or telecommunications,” the report adds.
Financial disclosures also reveal that Sherrill’s spouse retains up to a $50,000 investment in iShares MSCI China Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that appear to have been purchased in 2019. Sherrill also has up $15,000 invested in the ETF, which is comprised primarily of Alibaba and Tencent shares in addition to state-owned entities such as China Construction Bank.
Sherrill introduced the Election Technology Research Act of 2019 which authorized robust evaluations and changes to U.S. election infrastructure.
