China Exports Surveillance

When I first read about how China tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, it was impossible not to think of “1984” and Big Brother.

Since then, China has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. It’s Mao-era policing on steroids. And as my colleagues David Pierson and Berry Wang write, that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian states and weak democracies across the world.

China is exporting its surveillance state

by David Pierson and Berry Wang

A village in the Solomon Islands had a problem: Young men, buzzed on betel nut and moonshine, were causing trouble. Residents asked the police for help; the officers who responded were Chinese, part of a security pact the country had signed with Beijing.

The officers proposed a solution: collect fingerprints and palm prints from every resident, along with information listing the names, addresses and birth dates of each household member. The playbook was part of a Mao-era community-surveillance system, recently revived under President Xi Jinping of China, that encourages neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies.

China has spent decades perfecting a surveillance state at home. Now it’s exporting its ideology of state control — and the technology to enforce it.

The Fengqiao experience

China casts itself as a model of policing, pointing to its low rate of violent crime. But the same apparatus that keeps citizens safe is also routinely used to crush dissent.

Movement is monitored by a network of surveillance cameras, many equipped with A.I. software that recognizes faces and the way a person walks. Millions of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic group from northwest China, have been subjected to biometric data harvesting — DNA samples, iris scans and voice-pattern samples. The police have visited the homes of minority groups to promote party policies. Companies must register their employees in police databases.

Xi calls the system the “Fengqiao experience for a new era” — a reference to a town in eastern China that was notorious during the Mao era for encouraging residents to “re-educate” political enemies. Xi wants to embed the party and its security apparatus so deeply in daily life that no trouble, however minor or apolitical, can arise.

Exporting the model

Beijing’s pitch has appealed to many authoritarian and weak democratic states in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia, where leaders have welcomed the opportunity to use China’s assistance to entrench their power:

• Since 2000, China has held nearly 900 police-training sessions for at least 138 countries, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

• It’s embedded its officers in police forces in the Central African Republic, Vanuatu and Kiribati.

• It provided thousands of surveillance cameras to Ecuador in 2011, enabling the country’s domestic intelligence agency to better monitor political opponents.

• It trained a unit of South African police in 2016 later deployed to intimidate and assassinate political rivals of then-President Jacob Zuma, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Washington-based organization that is part of the U.S. Department of Defense.

Exporting police training “allows China to portray their system as a public safety success rather than a human rights failure,” said Sheena Chestnut Greitens, who co-authored the Carnegie study.

The Solomon Islands signed its security pact with Beijing in 2022. Three years earlier, China scored a diplomatic victory, persuading the government to sever decades of ties with Taiwan. But that inflamed tensions between the more developed island of Guadalcanal and the poorer, more pro-Taiwan island of Malaita. Deadly riots targeted the century-old Chinese community, which dominates retail, logging and mining interests, and when protesters tried to storm the home of Manasseh Sogavare, who was prime minister at the time, he signed the deal with China to combat “hard internal threats.”

The backlash

The 10 or so members of the Chinese police team sent to the Solomon Islands have been held up by Chinese state propaganda as an example of Beijing’s benevolence toward its neighbors.

News releases showed Chinese police putting on drone shows and kung fu demonstrations. China also donated riot gear worth $1.5 million, including bulletproof vests, shields, helmets and stab-resistant suits and gloves. Photographs on the Solomon Islands government website show Chinese police training local police how to wield batons and anti-riot forks, a tool commonly seen in China that is about the length of a pitchfork with a U-shaped prong to pin down a person.

But when the news emerged that the Chinese police team had proposed collecting biometric data, a backlash began.

Celsus Talifilu, a prominent political figure, wrote a blog post arguing that the police had no authority to collect vast amounts of personal information, register biometric data, or conduct neighborhood surveillance. He wrote that the Fengqiao model’s emphasis on monitoring and coercion threatened social harmony and local customs, such as having village chiefs resolve disputes.

“This is against our norms,” he said in an interview. “People will not take lightly to being spied on by their neighbors.”

In the end, the Fengqiao pilot program in the village was suspended. No biometric data was ever collected. And this month, the Solomon Islands elected a new prime minister more skeptical of Beijing.

The noisy youth are still a problem.

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