TECH NEWS – Intel, under pressure from the Chinese Communist Party, has removed all references to Xinjiang from its website.

Benzinga wrote about an open letter Intel sent out to its international suppliers in December. It asked them not to mention products from Xinjiang, which is a region in China where the Uyghur and other Turkic minorities are disadvantaged (and in the case of the former, the story is much more serious and bloody) so that they cannot follow the Islamic religion, for example. Human rights issues, in a nutshell…

In the open letter, Intel wrote, “multiple governments have imposed restrictions on products sourced from the Xinjiang region. Therefore, Intel is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labour or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.” Several human rights organisations have reported that one million people (including prison camps in Xinjiang and those of Islamic faith) are subjected to torture, slave labour and forced birth control.

The letter was immediately met with a tensional response from the Chinese government, which forced Intel to use “respected Chinese consumers, partners and the public” in the letter. Intel pointed out that the original letter was not intended to reflect what was happening in the world but to comply with US law. It has not been fully identified what was referred to, but presumably, it was the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to highlight the modification to Intel’s website and showed the modified letter with all Xinjiang references removed. In the new version of the letter, Intel “recently issued a statement in China to address concerns raised by our stakeholders there regarding how we communicated certain legal requirements and policies with our global supplier network.”

Intel is one of the sponsors of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and 26% of the company’s revenue comes from China (equivalent to about $20 billion). The money is making the tech company kneel to Xi Jinping…

Source: WCCFTech