The US is trying to prevent the training of Chinese pilots with NATO trainers
The Biden administration on Monday added 43 entities to an export watch list, including Frontier Services Group Ltd, an aviation and security company formerly run by Erik Prince, for training Chinese military pilots and other activities that threaten China's US national security.
The Test Flying Academy of South Africa, a flying school under scrutiny by British authorities for recruiting former British military pilots to train Chinese military pilots, has also been added to the US Department of Commerce's list of entities.
Companies on the list are barred from receiving US exports for activities deemed contrary to US interests. So no American pilots, or NATO, and no Western equipment, except that these pilots don't want to be arrested later.
The new listings include Frontier Services Group headquarters in China, Kenya, Laos and the United Arab Emirates; TFASA units in South Africa, China, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom; and aerospace and defense conglomerate Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) entities in China and South Africa.
In addition to recruiting Western pilots to train People's Liberation Army pilots in Western aircraft maneuvers, the firms were added to the list for purchasing US-sourced items in support of China's military modernization, including weapons development and hypersonic flight modeling, the Commerce Department said in a statement. In the past there had already been investigations involving pilots from NATO or allied countries such as Australia involved in the training of Chinese pilots.
“It is imperative to prevent China from acquiring US technologies and know-how to enable its military modernization programs,” Commerce official Matthew Axelrod said in a statement.
In total, thirty-one Chinese entities have been added to the list.
For example, Shanghai Supercomputing Technology Co Ltd was added for offering cloud-based supercomputing capabilities to support hypersonic research. Two companies were added for allowing China to carry out human rights abuses, including as part of its crackdown on Ugyhur Muslims and other minority groups in Xinjiang in western China.
Ryan Wende Science and Technology Co in Beijing purchases and distributes mobile phone inspection software, fingerprint analysis technology, biostatistics software and DNA testing items to Public Security Bureaus throughout China the Commerce Department said.
Xinjiang Kehua Hechang Biological Science and Technology Co Ltd purchases and distributes biotechnology items to the Entity List Xingjiang Construction and Production Corps and Xinjiang Public Service Bureaus. United Nations experts and rights estimate that over one million people, mostly Uyghurs and Muslim minorities, have been detained in camps in China's western Xinjiang region in recent years. China has denied all allegations of abuse. The United States also removed Latvia's Fiber Optic Solutions from its list of entities on Monday. Fiber Optic Solutions, which manufactures fiber optic gyroscopes and other equipment, was added in December for its contributions to Russia's military and/or defense industrial base.
These sanctions bring to light a name that had already made headlines in the past: Erik Prince, a private security executive, was the founder of the security firm Blackwater. According to his LinkedIn profile, Prince served as a vice president of Frontier Services Group from 2014 to 2021, the currently sanctioned pilot training company
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The article US seeks to prevent Chinese pilot training with NATO trainers comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/gli-usa-cercano-di-impedire-laddestramento-dei-piloti-cinesi-con-addestratori-nato/ on Wed, 14 Jun 2023 11:29:42 +0000.