For years, Xu Li toiled with millions of lines of computer codes to establish an artificial intelligence (AI) system to empower manufacturing, enhance surveillance and enrich social matrix. Then in October 2019, Donald Trump’s administration dropped a bomb on Xu, chief executive of SenseTime, naming his company as an enabler of human rights abuses against Muslim Uygurs in western China’s Xinjiang region. Then last December, the US banned American funds from investing in SenseTime, in an escalation that forced the company to postpone the pricing of its stock sale in Hong Kong. Still, what happened with SenseTime reflects how growing…