It’s not just Chinese firms that have enabled the Chinese government to track people 24-7 using cameras and software. “Western companies including Intel, IBM, Seagate, Cisco and Sun Technologies are among those…that helped make China’s surveillance state technologically and financially viable.” (Academics and publishers in the west have also helped.)
The words are from Emily Feng’s review at NRP.org of the 2022 book Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control by Josh Chin and Liza Lin.
China has undoubtedly unlocked an impressive, if chilling, achievement: absolute social control with relatively little of the unseemly and highly visible physical oppression seen in lower-tech authoritarian countries, such as Iran or Russia.
However, such control masks a disturbing level of systemic bias and outright inaccuracy baked into China’s deeply penetrating digital surveillance systems. Some of the anecdotes Chin and Lin include are laughable. In one, a noted political dissident is visited by police after, out of boredom, he purchases a slingshot online; the officers suspect he has purchased the toy to take out the numerous CCTV cameras trained on his home.
Others stories are far more troubling. Chin and Lin tell the haunting tale of a Uyghur poet and filmmaker named Tahir Hamut Izgil, who now lives in the U.S. Hamut and his family describe having their blood, iris, fingerprints, and voice recordings collected by Xinjiang police, to be input into a biometric database. At least hundreds of thousands of their fellow Uyghurs have been detained or imprisoned, often on the basis of seemingly flimsy evidence such as usage of chat apps like WhatsApp; surveys filed by cadres sent to live with and report on Uyghur families; or…blanket algorithms [indicating] religious extremism.
Feng’s judgment that China’s “absolute social control” is achieved with “relatively little of the unseemly and highly visible physical oppression” common in some other lands is at least half-wrong, as indicated in the third paragraph above. Mass imprisonment, brainwashing, torture, rape, and murder of Uyghurs and other Muslims may not be “highly visible” to those who don’t live near persons being abducted and sent to camps. But the treatment of the Uyghurs, practitioners of Falun Gong, and members of other targeted groups is surely unseemly.
Probably, though, Chinese citizens who are not specifically targeted can often avoid witnessing or being subjected to overtly physical oppression as long as they themselves sufficiently cooperate with the demands of the totalitarian state.
