Of course you can do business with a Marxist-Leninist regime. You can do business with anybody as long as you don't expect them to play by Euro-American rules. We didn't do business with the USSR because they didn't have anything we wanted.
On an absolute scale, that don't sound too bad. That'd be about a third of a million. We have 2,264 million (excepting uniformed Armed Forces), for about 7 per 1000.
But the rapid rise is concerning.