A Chinese energy company financially linked to Hunter Biden, the son of the President of the United States, developed technology to improve cotton harvesting in Xinjiang, an industry that relies on Chinese Communist Party forced labor.
The invention â€" a thin film to cover fields â€" was created by the Biden-linked Chinese state-owned enterprise Sinopec and helped defend cotton from unfavorable climate conditions and weeds, according to The Global Times.
The development comes amidst controversy over the use of forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton fields, prompting many Western clothing brands to halt their use of cotton from the region. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBO) also banned American companies from importing cotton from Xinjiang based on information that "reasonably indicates" the use of forced labor within China's so-called "re-education" camps.
Evidence from Chinese government documents and media reports indicate that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in Xinjiang are forced to pick cotton by hand via state-mandated labor, according to a report by the Center for Global Policy published last month.
Sinopec’s involvement in this global human rights abuse comes amidst the president’s son retaining financial ties to the Chinese Communist Party-linked company.
Sinopec Capital is the clean energy investment arm of the Sinopec Group, a Chinese Communist Party-run oil and gas enterprise whose "fully-owned subsidiary" Sinopec Marketing Company enjoyed nearly $1 billion in investment from Hunter Biden's private equity firm BHR Partners.
Finalized in March 2015, the investments from the controversial investment fund led to BHR Partners amassing a nearly 30 percent stake in Sinopec. Hunter reportedly still owns a 10 percent stake in BHR Partners, whose LinkedIn profile highlights its Sinopec investment, revealing it was involved "in the pilot state-owned enterprise reform deal involving the segregation and capitalization of Sinopec Group's non-oil business into Sinopec Marketing Corporation."
BHR Partners was a joint venture between Rosemont Seneca Partners, an investment fund founded by Hunter Biden and Obama-era Secretary of State John Kerry's stepson in 2009, and the state-owned Bank of China. The billion-dollar fund was notoriously birthed less than two weeks after Hunter traveled to China alongside his father and then Vice President.
