Tencent Threatens It Will Take "Legal Proceedings" Against The U.S. Department Of Defense After It Was Labeled A Chinese Military Company
Chinese developer Tencent threated it will take “legal proceedings” against the United States Department of Defense after it was labeled a Chinese military company.
The Department of Defense issued a document titled “Notice of Availability of Designation of Chinese Military Companies.”
The document is a list of entities that the Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks believes qualify as “‘Chinese military companies’ in accordance with the William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.
TenCent Holdings Limited is included in the list.
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TenCent issued a response to being categorized as a Chinese military company, “As the Company is neither a Chinese military company nor a military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base, it believes that its inclusion in the CMC List is a mistake. Unlike other lists maintained by the U.S. Government for sanctions or export control measures, inclusion in the CMC List relates only to U.S. defense procurement, which does not affect the business of the Group.”
It continued, “Inclusion in the CMC List will not prohibit any persons (other than the Department of Defense) from business dealings with the Company, including transacting in the securities of the Company.”
Finally, it declared, “The Company intends to initiate a Reconsideration Process to correct this mistake. During the process, it will engage in discussions with the U.S. Department of Defense to resolve any misunderstanding, and if necessary, will undertake legal proceedings to remove the Company from the CMC list.”
TenCent Holdings contains a number of subsidiaries including Tencent Games, Tencent Video, Tencent Pictures, Tencent News, Tencent Sports, Tencent Animation and Comics and more.
It also runs a number of social media networks including Weixin/WeChat, QQ, and Qzone.
Furthermore, it also provides a number financial services including Tencent Blockhain, QQ Wallet, Business Tenpay, and more.
Finally, it also owns Tencent Mobile Manager, QQ Mail, Tencent Map, QQ Browser, and other browser and email management tools.
The games portion of the company “offers more than 140 self-developed and licensed games across 200 countries and regions, which provides hundreds of millions of users with cross-platform interactive entertainment experiences. Honor of Kings, PUBG MOBILE, and League of Legends are some of the most popular titles around the world.”
Other games the company owns or co-owns include Call of Duty: Mobile, Naruto, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Saint Seiya, Dune: Awakening, The Division 2, Fortnite, Perfect World, Red Alert OL, Digimon: New Generation, and more.
It also owns or partially owns a number of studios including Funcom, Riot Games, Supercell, Epic Games, Bloober Team, Netmarble, FromSoftware, Remedy Entertainment, Krafton, Ubisoft, and Kadowaka Corporation among others.
What do you make of Tencent’s response to being included on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Chinese Military Companies list?
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Leaving aside the issue of Chinese companies' work with their government (which would need a whole separate topic), this is not much more than the outgoing administration trying to do its best to piss off the incoming administration. Biden's band has nothing to lose now, while Trump's team will have to do all the explanations for any Chinese company removed from whatever list Biden has put it on.
Every company based in China is part of the Chinese military to some extent as pursuant to Chinese law which mandates their cooperation with the Chinese military, whether that's information warfare or influence warfare or physical warfare.