A Chinese company backed by American pension fund money and built by one of world's premier private equity firms publicly touted its ties to China's surveillance apparatus. Is U.S. outbound investment in trouble?
In March 2020, a town 30 miles northeast of Shanghai’s city center was scrambling to respond to the unfolding pandemic. In its effort to control the spread of Covid-19, the town of Shuxin announced that the government would be implementing a new technology in its government buildings: The “CUE All-in-One Machine.”
A sleek black device with a camera at eye level, a wide square screen in the middle and two skinny poles connected to wheels at the bottom, the All-in-One Machine uses facial recognition technology and thermal imaging to identify individuals who are walking by and take their temperature. It was produced by Cue Group, a China-based portfolio company held by one of the world’s biggest financial services firms, the American private equity giant KKR & Company.
The CUE All-in-One Machine. Credit: Cue Group
But the device’s utility goes far beyond pandemic prevention. As Cue’s head of new retail products made clear during the 2020 announcement i
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Agribusiness giant Syngenta is unique on the world stage: it is a state-owned Chinese firm with an American CEO. After ChemChina's historic purchase of the company in 2017 — the largest ever purchase by a Chinese company overseas — Syngenta is now ready for its big China debut with a planned blockbuster IPO in Shanghai this fall. But while "modernizing" farming in China has been good for Syngenta's business, helping Beijing achieve its long-sought after goal of food self sufficiency will be more complicated feat.
The journalists and authors talk about what sets China's use of surveillance tech apart from other countries; how the building blocks of that tech came from the West; and how the surveillance state can be...
