Former House Foreign Affairs committee chair Ed Royce is lobbying for Chinese tech giant Tencent
15 September 2020
Former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Ed Royce, a Republican from California, has registered as a lobbyist for Chinese tech giant Tencent, which helps implement the Chinese Communist Party's censorship and surveillance regime.
The catch: While in office, Royce was an outspoken critic of the Vietnamese Communist Party's human rights abuses and backed several bills targeting China.
The big picture: Royce is only the latest in a line of former elected officials to lobby on behalf of Chinese companies accused of being complicit in human rights abuses.
Driving the news: Tencent has retained several lobbying firms to help plead its cause in Washington amid the looming ban on WeChat, including Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP, where Royce works.
Background: Inside China, Tencent's WeChat is a "super-app" that most Chinese people use not just for messaging but also for banking, hailing cabs, paying bills and running their businesses.
- Chinese residents know that if they post politically sensitive content on WeChat, Chinese public security officials could show up at their doors within hours. Tencent readily hands over user data to the Chinese government and allows public security officials ongoing access to messages, facilitating the CCP's authoritarian crackdown on any kind of dissent.
- The Xinjiang public security bureau has used WeChat to identify, surveil and threaten Uighurs abroad, as China has engaged in a sweeping campaign of repression aimed at forcibly assimilating the ethnic minority.
Royce has a long history of criticizing a different Communist party's human rights record:
- Royce threw his support behind a 2007 bill that would withdraw non-humanitarian support from Vietnam unless the government made progress in human rights, such as the release of political prisoners.
- He explicitly discouraged the idea that warming ties with Vietnam meant the U.S. could overlook human rights abuses there.
- "The United States has a growing relationship with Vietnam, particularly in the security and trade arenas. However, human rights remain a core value to us and we cannot segregate them from our on-going engagement with the Vietnamese government," said Royce in a June 2017 statement.
Royce did not respond to a request for comment.
The bottom line:Money talks.
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.