Letter to Pentagon Requesting Blacklist for Chinese LCD & OLED Display Companies

Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about the growing threat to U.S. economic and national security posed by Chinese state-subsidized LCD (liquid crystal display) and OLED (organic light emitting diode) companies, BOE Technology Group and Tianma Microelectronics Co.. While LCD and OLED are common technologies found in televisions and similar devices, Moolenaar highlights the technologies’ critical role in our own weapon systems and notes that BOE and Tianma have accumulated large amounts of the global display market through state subsidies, posing a supply chain risk for our military. Moreover, Moolenaar exposes BOE and Tianma’s deep connections to the People’s Liberation Army through their parent companies and participation in military-fusion zones in China.

In the letter, Chairman Moolenaar writes, “The PRC engages in aggressive state-sponsored subsidization of the two primary display technologies: liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. By doing so, it drives non-PRC companies from the market and bolsters PRC dominance of the industry. In LCD, the industry’s legacy technology, the PRC’s share of global production capacity has grown from 0% in 2004 to 72% today, and non-PRC manufacturers are rapidly exiting the market due to their inability to compete… A similar evolution is now underway in OLED, the current generation of display technology; the PRC’s share of global production capacity has grown from 1% in 2014 to 51% today.”

He continues, “Most alarmingly, both companies are tied to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and support its efforts. Tianma is identified by the U.S. Department of State as a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC)… BOE was initially founded in 1993 as a military and defense supplier, and it is integrated as at least a subprime contractor for the PLA; many of its customers are known PLA suppliers, such as HiSense.”

Because of the firms’ connections to the Chinese military, Moolenaar requests that the Pentagon places both BOE and Tianna on the DoD 1260h blacklist as Chinese military companies.

View Moolenaar’s letter to Secretary Austin HERE