SenseTime, a Chinese artificial intelligence start-up, said Monday it will press ahead with its Hong Kong listing, a week after it was blacklisted by the United States over accusations of genocide in Xinjiang.
An initial listing earlier this month was pulled when the US Treasury announced new sanctions, saying that SenseTime's facial recognition programmes were designed in part to be used against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
The Hong Kong stock exchange filed a revised listing with trading expected to start December 30.
The company wrote that because of the dynamic nature of the US regulations, we have to exclude US investors.
According to Bloomberg News, SenseTime had secured $512 million from nine cornerstone investors, including the state-backed Mixed-Ownership Reform Fund and the Shanghai Xuhui Capital Investment Company.
Washington accuses SenseTime of being part of China's military-industrial complex that provides technology for mass surveillance in Xinjiang.
It says SenseTime has developed facial recognition software that can be used to determine a person's ethnicity, including whether someone looks Uyghur.
SenseTime refuted the accusations, saying that they were unfounded and that the company was caught in the middle of geopolitical tension. Treasury sanctions prevent individuals from entering the US, block assets under US jurisdiction and prevent companies from doing business with American individuals or entities, effectively locking companies out of the US banking system.
It was almost impossible for US investment banks to get involved in Hong Kong listings because of the blacklisting.
The plight of the Uyghurs has contributed to worsening relations between Western powers and Beijing.
It has also ensnared a growing number of international businesses in tit-for-tat sanctions between the two sides.
UN experts and researchers estimate that more than one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been incarcerated in prison camps in Xinjiang.
Human rights groups and foreign governments have found evidence of mass detentions, forced labour, political indoctrination, torture and forced sterilization.
Washington has described it as a genocide.
After initially denying the existence of the Xinjiang camps, China defended them as vocational training centres aimed at reducing the appeal of Islamic extremism.