“Confirms” because if you know something about the Chinese Communist Party, you know that the Party must be spying on at least many of the foreigners traveling or working in China. It’s surveilling everybody else, and the apparatus is ubiquitous. So why wouldn’t foreigners also be in the crosshairs? And foreigners are inherently suspicious.
Somebody has spied on the Chinese government’s massive spying of foreigners and leaked a database. It shows that certain foreigners within the country get more attention than others (Social News, May 24, 2026).
A massive surveillance system established by the Chinese Communist Party is tracking the real-time locations, interpersonal relationships, and activity histories of foreigners within China, reports said.
The platform, known as the Dynamic Control Platform for Overseas Personnel, tracks the foreign personnel by integrating security cameras, facial recognition, visa records, and mobile app data, the New Tang Dynasty Television reported, citing an analysis by cybersecurity research organisation NetAskari.
Foreign journalists and other “sensitive individuals” are designated as primary targets for the surveillance.
“Apart from foreign journalists, the platform focuses on specific groups, including citizens of the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States]. The system monitors the exact distribution of these citizens within specific Chinese cities, down to the neighbourhood block level,” Mary Man said, writing for the NTD….
China now has one monitoring device for every two citizens, with a surveillance network exceeding 700 million cameras.
Because of the leak, “the vigilance among foreign visitors has been significantly heightened….” Foreigners finding out about this surveillance may now now be more self-conscious and more careful—unless they had already assumed, as they should have, that something like this was happening. The database is news but not a revelation.
“In the Chinese context, it makes sense that they’re tracking journalists who they consider an ‘enemy of the state’, or at least worth keeping an eye on, and that’s been around since the inception of the People’s Republic of China,” says Marc Hofer of NetAskari, the cybersecurity research firm that discovered the Dynamic Control Platform.
The Chinese Communist Party has “never liked journalists from the get-go. Journalists are seen as just another actor in this big game of controlling the narrative, controlling the minds of the people, controlling the reality of history.”
