Is China’s Digital Surveillance Technology Made in USA?
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Commentary
As China’s economic fortunes continue to decline, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) increasingly relies on controlling its population.
One of the tools the Party uses is social credit scoring via its social credit system. It’s essentially a combination of city and regional systems that track one’s behavior, and those in charge (more accurately, the algorithm within the system) decide who’s trustworthy and who isn’t.
In this digital dystopian structure, everyone must maintain an acceptable social credit score to function in Chinese society. The level of control the CCP has over the people is staggering.
The Surveillance Capital of the World
China is, without a doubt, the world’s most digitally authoritarian country. It’s essentially one giant digital prison with a lot more than just cameras on every corner. Everything about your life—from your phone to your purchases, travel plans, and electricity use—can be collected, tracked, and scored. Local police departments and state agencies feed it into huge data systems.Essentially, the state knows you as well as you know yourself. Combined with advanced behavioral analytics, the probability is that the state knows you even better than you know yourself, from your online game-playing strategies to how you smell.
But it gets worse. Your keystrokes, conversations, website visits, and even the way you dress, walk, and make facial expressions are monitored and assessed for any potential harmful intent toward the state and the CCP. The consequences are as real as they are frightening.
Thought Crime and Punishment
The scoring mechanism now has the power to monitor your opinions and thoughts. For example, if you read online material deemed “wrong” by authorities, you may see your credit score fall. If your social credit score falls too low, you can be blacklisted from participating in society. Every year, for example, millions of people are blocked from buying plane or even train tickets—one year alone saw 17.5 million flight bans and 5.5 million train bans.However, the list of punishments in China’s social credit system extends to travel restrictions both within and outside the country. It also includes the denial of fundamental aspects of living in society, such as access to good schools or jobs, being precluded from accessing capital for business or personal use, or even losing the right to own or run a business.
Don’t Think, Don’t Step Out of Line
There’s also, of course, public shaming. That can mean your name and face being plastered on a billboard or displayed on a digital screen, demeaning your dignity, value, and worth as a human being for everyone to see and know that they must avoid interacting with you. In effect, the state can decide to impoverish and socially ostracize you, making you a pariah among your own friends and family.The words from an old 1960s protest song, “You step out of line, the man come and take you away,” ring true in today’s China with horrific accuracy. Say, write, or even read the wrong thing, and you may be taken away. This applies to private individuals and students, but it also includes billionaire tech founders and financiers, such as Jack Ma and Ren Zhiqiang, both of whom have voiced contrary opinions on state policies. No one is above the social credit score, or better said, no one is safe from the totalitarian reach and punishment of the CCP.
No Safe Spaces
Additionally, some local-level social credit programs require citizens to provide free labor. Performing community tasks, such as road repairs and other free labor services, is often compulsory to keep one’s social credit score in good standing.That used to be called “slavery.”
If such degradations were not enough, even one’s home is not safe from the CCP’s reach via the installation of QR scanners that evaluate your behavior and social credit score on a daily basis.
But how did China go from an agrarian, Marxist backwater to the surveillance leader of the world in only 40 years?
Silicon Valley
The technology that made it all a reality didn’t come from Beijing; it came from Silicon Valley. Many tech moguls made billions from it without any negative consequences. They were the virtual enablers that have helped enslave, persecute, and oppress hundreds of millions—if not more than a billion—of people.IBM’s i2 software, for example, is designed to help law enforcement analyze data. But in the hands of Chinese police, it’s used to monitor entire populations, especially Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
According to a recent report by The Associated Press, multiple tech giants, including Dell, VMware, Oracle, and Microsoft, have provided cloud systems, servers, and software to Chinese law enforcement agencies and actively partnered with them in regions already known for their heavy surveillance.
Meanwhile, U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia and Intel actively pursued selling opportunities in China, providing the CCP with facial recognition and video analysis software, which make up the backbone of China’s surveillance networks.
American companies’ complicity also includes U.S.-made mapping software that’s used to establish “digital fences” and alert systems that warn the authorities when someone steps outside their allowed area.
In short, American technology is responsible for enabling the CCP to run the world’s largest, most oppressive prison society.
Chinese companies, in coordination with the CCP, are using the technologies we sold them to surveil and control their people, as well as to spy on Americans in the United States.
Where do these U.S. companies’ allegiances lie? With America or with the CCP?
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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