SHANGHAI — The world has largely sat by for nearly two years as China detained more than one million people, mostly Muslims and members of minority ethnic groups, in internment camps to force them to embrace the Communist Party.

Now, the Trump administration is taking the first public steps by a major world government toward punishing Beijing. In doing so, it is opening up a new front in the already worsening relationship between Washington and Beijing: human rights and the dystopian world of digital surveillance.

Trump administration officials on Monday placed eight Chinese companies and a number of police departments on a blacklist that forbids them to buy American-made technology like microchips, software and other vital components. The companies are at the vanguard of China’s surveillance and artificial intelligence ambitions, with many of them selling increasingly sophisticated systems used by governments to track people.

The White House cited their business in Xinjiang, a region of northwestern China that is home to a largely Muslim minority group known as the Uighurs. The United States government says more than one million ethnic Uighurs and other minorities have been locked in detention camps there.