EXCLUSIVE: Ex‑Beijing Engineer Reveals How Far the CCP Will Go to Track Its Own—and You
Udumbara
A former Beijing software engineer who once considered himself a loyal Communist Party supporter says he helped build a phone app the Chinese navy uses to watch every tap, swipe, and step its sailors took—and that the same technology, he warns, could track anyone who carries a Chinese-made device.
Liu Dadong fled to the United States in 2019 after his younger brother was branded “pro-Taiwan independence.” In an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times, he said the navy project was only a fragment of Beijing’s plan to control both hardware and software at home and abroad.
From chips seeded with hidden code to apps that seize a phone’s highest privileges, he said, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is arming itself to monitor ordinary Americans as easily as its own citizens.
In 2017, Liu joined a tech firm in Beijing’s Zhongguancun district—China’s version of Silicon Valley—as a software developer. The boss soon asked the team to prepare a bid for a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy contract.
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Liu first assumed his firm was a token bidder, added only to make a pre-arranged tender look competitive. Such contracts, he said, normally go to bigger companies with political pull and kickbacks.
“But once you saw what we were building, you knew it was for surveillance,” he said. The assignment was real: Design a system that forces every sailor to install a custom app, funnel all data to a central server, and capture everything.
How the Spy App Worked
“Once the app was on the phone, it grabbed the top‑level permissions and pulled every piece of information inside,” Liu said.The system logged which apps the sailor opened, which websites he visited, whom he called, which keys he typed, what he searched, what photos he took, where he took them, and how often he typed “sensitive words.”
A built‑in list of sensitive terms—updated regularly from an official database—flags forbidden queries in real time.
One specific test involved what they called “location monitoring,” Liu said.
If the phone moved more than 100 meters (328 feet) beyond a preset point, the app will record the breach—and could either pop up a warning on the screen for the user or stay silent so superiors alone would know, Liu explained.
“If your phone frequently leaves the base perimeter, they can label you a spy,” he said.
Liu said the underlying logic of the mobile‑surveillance system applies everywhere.
Trojan Horses at the Chip Level
Phone apps, Liu warned, are only the surface. “The deepest, hardest-to-detect level is inside the chip.”Chips are so small, he said, that finding the Trojan horse—the embedded back door—“is almost impossible without the design schematics.”
That fear, he added, explains why Beijing is racing to replace foreign semiconductors—even when home-grown chips run slower and crash more.
If a U.S. or Taiwanese maker ever planted its own kill switch in a foreign chip, Liu said, “the CCP would have no defense. The code could lie dormant for years, then shut down every device—or feed false data—the moment a war breaks out.”
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Surveillance at Home and Abroad
The CCP’s mass‑surveillance systems—SkyNet and Sharp Eyes—already tie together more than 600 million cameras nationwide, feeding footage into one backbone for face, voice, and gait recognition.Nearly all Chinese apps demand full phone permissions; once granted, algorithms fuse browsing histories, voice prints, gait patterns, and contact lists to map a user’s political tendencies, Liu said. “They can pinpoint you.”
The danger now, he said, is that these mature surveillance technologies can target Americans once enough data is obtained.
“At the low end, they run scam calls. More advanced, they study investment habits, political preferences, even church attendance in one ZIP code,” Liu explained.
“With enough U.S. data, they could steer investment trends or spark protests. In a free society, that’s lethal. If you hold every voter’s profile, you can predict—or shape—the result before election day.”
Can Anyone Stay Private?
Inside China, Liu said, complete privacy is a fantasy. Even iPhones sold through official channels must clear Chinese security demands.Smuggled phones might fare better, “but the CCP could kick them off the carrier network and monitor them differently,” he added.
“If you really need to stay dark, use an old Nokia that only makes calls,” he advised.
His family learned the risk firsthand. After his brother posted videos praising Taiwan during the island’s 2018 elections, police confronted their parents with transcripts of their private WeChat chats.
“If they can lock on to us, they can lock on to anyone,” Liu said.
The crackdown shattered Liu’s faith. When he tried to defend his brother online, “my account was deleted after two comments—the first time I’d ever been censored.”
Police began stopping by his parents’ home, and local officials called for updates. “I’d always been ... well-behaved, loyal,” he said. “Suddenly, the state’s iron hand came down on us for no reason.”
He booked one‑way tickets and left China in February 2019.
From the safety of the United States, Liu now warns that the surveillance web he helped weave for the Chinese navy could be spun anywhere that the Chinese technology takes root.
