World Bank Funding Genocide

China tried to get World Bank to fund surveillance in East Turkestan
By Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

Chinese recipients of World Bank loans tried to secure funding for the purchase of facial recognition technology for use in China’s northwest colony of East Turkestan, according to documents obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: The World Bank's loan program in East Turkestan demonstrates the extreme moral hazard that is now facing any organization with operations in the region, where China has constructed a surveillance state and detained more than a million ethnic minorities.
In more than 8,000 pages of official World Bank Chinese-language procurement documents dated June 2017 and reviewed by Axios, Chinese recipients of the loan program requested tens of thousands of dollars for the purchase of facial recognition cameras and software, night-vision cameras, and other surveillance technology for use in East Turkestan schools.
The World Bank told Axios those funds were not yet disbursed.
A World Bank spokesperson said, “As an institution focused on ending poverty, the World Bank knows that inclusive societies are key to sustainable development, and we take a strong line against discrimination of any kind. We promote equal access to opportunities, including education and training, so that everyone can seek to realize his or her full potential. We are fully committed to the integrity of our projects. We respond immediately when issues are raised, and we act based on facts.”

The big picture: In 2015, the World Bank began a loan program called the “East Turkestan Technical and Vocational Education and Training Project.” 

The program provides $50 million over five years to five vocational schools and their partner schools.
By early 2017, China had blanketed East Turkestan in surveillance, which it used to help round up ethnic minorities into concentration camps Beijing doublespeak calls "vocational training centers." 

The World Bank did not review or scale back the program at that time.

In August, the loan program came under congressional scrutiny for complicity in China’s repression.
In November, the World Bank announced it was scaling back the program and would only fund the original "schools", not their partners.
But the 2017 procurement documents came from those five original "schools", which continue to receive World Bank funding.
One of the items requested by a World Bank-funded school was a video management and facial recognition software system that can create a “blacklist face database that can be set and armed” so that “blacklist alarms can be performed when blacklisted individuals pass through” and the resulting images sent directly to Chinese police.
Such systems have been used to flag East Turkestan ethnic minorities for extrajudicial detention.
A requirement for one of the facial recognition systems requested by a World Bank-funded "school" was that it be able to "distinguish between males and females with a reliability of 97%."
The vast majority of the more than 1 million detainees in the camps are male — being both Uighur and male is essentially an automatic strike against a person.The budget request for the system was approximately $12,800.
The World Bank confirmed to Axios that the "schools" had requested the equipment, but stated that the government had canceled the procurement plan in October 2017 and that no World Bank funds were provided for surveillance equipment.

Between the lines: A World Bank spokesperson also told Axios that the June 2017 procurement documents had not been translated into English, meaning only Chinese-speaking staff could read them, complicating oversight of this specific procurement plan.
The spokesperson said that one of its partner schools in East Turkestan — the school that purchased $30,000 in riot gear and tear gas launchers in 2017, resulting in a media storm— had been the scene of violent anti-government protests in 2014.
The procurement documents also show loan recipients wanted equipment that was “compatible” with Chinese video surveillance manufacturers HikVision and DaHua, which have provided similar equipment for the camps and local governments in East Turkestan.
In October, the U.S. government prohibited U.S. companies from exporting components to Hikvision and Dahua without approval, citing their complicity in gross human rights violations.
The bottom line: The World Bank continued the loan program after the Chinese "schools" requested highly advanced surveillance equipment for a simple educational project — a lapse that bolsters Sen. Chuck Grassley's concerns about a massive "breakdown" in its oversight process.

Go deeper: Read the procurement documents

By Taking Aim at Chinese Tech Firms, President Trump Signals a Strategy Shift

In blacklisting surveillance companies, the United States is the first major government to punish China for its crackdown on Muslims.
By Paul Mozur and Edward Wong
Hikvision cameras in a mall in Beijing in May. The company was among those blacklisted by the Trump administration this week.

SHANGHAI — The world has largely sat by for nearly two years as China detained more than one million people, mostly Muslims and members of minority ethnic groups, in concentration camps to force them to embrace the Communist Party.
Now, the Trump administration is taking the first public steps by a major world government toward punishing Beijing. 

In doing so, it is opening up a new front in the already worsening relationship between Washington and Beijing: human rights and the dystopian world of digital surveillance.
Trump administration officials on Monday placed eight Chinese companies and a number of police departments on a blacklist that forbids them to buy American-made technology like microchips, software and other vital components. 

The companies are at the vanguard of China’s surveillance and artificial intelligence ambitions, with many of them selling increasingly sophisticated systems used by governments to track people.
The White House cited their business in East Turkestan, a colony of northwestern China that is home to a largely Muslim minority group known as the Uighurs. 

More than one million ethnic Uighurs and other minorities have been locked in concentration camps there.On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced visa restrictions on Chinese officials believed to be involved in the detention or abuse of Muslim ethnic minorities.
The announcements suggest that the Trump administration is increasingly willing to listen to the advice of American officials focused on the strategic challenges posed by China and who are concerned about its human rights abuses, even if President Trump himself never seems to pay much attention to those.
The restrictions were announced just two days before American and Chinese officials were set to begin a 13th round of trade talks, most likely putting a chill over the negotiations.
More broadly, the White House, in its blacklist announcement, signaled a willingness to take aim at China’s technological dreams. 

China has plowed billions of dollars into companies developing advanced hardware and software to catch up with the United States. 

Some of the companies added to the list on Monday are among the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence start-ups.

A showroom video promoting Megvii’s facial recognition abilities.

Much of that technology — including facial recognition and computer vision — can be used to track people. 

That includes smartphone tracking, voice-pattern identification and systems that track individuals across cities through powerful cameras. 

Washington officials have grown increasingly worried about China’s ambitions to export its systems elsewhere, including places known for human rights abuses.

“This is an important first step in making some of the companies that have benefited the most from the concentration camps system in East Turkestan feel the consequences of their actions,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs.
He said the move signaled that abuse of minority groups in East Turkestan“is real and justifies a political and economic response.”
It is also a potentially groundbreaking use of a powerful tool that the American government typically uses against terrorists. 

The Chinese companies and police departments were placed on what is called an entity list, which forbids them to buy sensitive American exports unless Washington grants American companies specific permission to sell to them.
Use of the entity list over a human rights issue may be a first, said Julian Ku, a professor of constitutional and international law at Hofstra University.
“As far as I know, it was the first time Commerce explicitly cited human rights as a foreign policy interest of the U.S. for purposes of export controls,” he said, referring to the Department of Commerce, which manages the entity lists. 

“This is not an implausible reading of the regulations, but it is new and has potentially very broad applicability.”

The immediate effect on the Chinese companies is likely to be minimal, because many have stockpiled essential supplies, but they could feel increasing pain if they stay on the blacklist for months or years.
Perhaps more important, it can put a cloud over the companies’ reputations, limiting their sales in the United States or elsewhere and keeping them from hiring the world’s best technology talent.
“The U.S. move today puts up a big roadblock on the road to internationalization,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at MacroPolo, the think tank of the Paulson Institute.
“Most global technology companies are setting up labs abroad, partnering with the best universities around the world and looking to recruit top talent from everywhere,” he said. 

“That all just got a lot harder now that they’re marked with the scarlet letter of the entity list.”
The move followed more than a year of internal debate over how to punish China for its persecution of Muslims in  East Turkestan.
Senior officials on the National Security Council and in the State Department have pushed for the use of the entity list to target Chinese companies supplying surveillance technology to the security forces in  East Turkestan. 

They have also urged President Trump to approve sanctions that would penalize Chinese officials and companies involved in the abuses.
But top American trade negotiators, including the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, have cautioned against policies that would upset trade talks. 

Mr. Trump has said he wants to reach a trade deal with China.
Until now, other top officials, most notably Mr. Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, have denounced China’s policies in East Turkestan but not enacted punitive measures. 

This month, American customs officials blocked products from a Chinese garment maker in East Turkestan, but they had held off on stronger action.
The Chinese companies on the list include Hikvision, a major maker of surveillance cameras, and the well-funded artificial intelligence start-ups SenseTime and Megvii.

A Hikvision camera in downtown Beijing. American officials worry that China will export its surveillance systems.

SenseTime said it set “high ethical standards for A.I. technologies,” while Megvii said it required “clients not to weaponize our technology or solutions or use them for illegal purposes.” 

It added that it had generated no revenue from within East Turkestan in the first half of 2019.

New York Times reporting showed that four of the companies on the list — Yitu, Hikvision, Megvii and SenseTime — helped build systems across China that sought to use facial recognition to automate the detection of Uighurs.

Government procurement documents, company marketing materials and official government releases tied all eight companies to various business operations and sales in East Turkestan. 

The many local East Turkestan police bureaus on the list buy commercial American technology like Intel microchips and Microsoft Windows software, according to procurement documents.
President Trump’s next step could be imposing sanctions on specific Chinese officials working in East Turkestan. 

Among the officials discussed is Chen Quanguo, a Politburo member who is the party chief in East Turkestan and an architect of the system of internment camps and surveillance.
The blacklist action is a sign that strategic advisors have become even more influential in the administration in recent weeks.
Matthew Pottinger, the senior director for Asia and an architect of policies aimed at countering China, was promoted to deputy national security adviser last month. 

Earlier, Robert O’Brien, the administration’s top hostage negotiator, replaced John R. Bolton as national security adviser. 

Mr. O’Brien has written that China poses an enormous challenge to the United States.
“This East Turkestan package has been in the works now for months,” said Samm Sacks, a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America, a think tank. 

“So the fact that it comes out now just ahead of the next round of trade talks sends a signal from those in the administration who want no deal.”

China's crimes against humanity

U.S. Blacklists 28 Chinese Entities Over Abuses in East Turkestan

By Ana Swanson and Paul Mozur

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Monday that it had added 28 Chinese organizations to a United States blacklist over concerns about their role in human rights violations, effectively blocking those entities from buying American products.
The organizations have been implicated in China’s campaign targeting Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the colony of East Turkestan, according to a Commerce Department filing.
Among the entities being placed on the list are Hikvision and Dahua Technology, two of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance products. 

It also hits China’s well-funded, newly emerging class of artificial-intelligence start-ups. 

Together, the companies’ products are central to China’s ambitions to be the top global exporter of surveillance technology.
The list also includes companies that specialize in artificial intelligence, voice recognition and data as well as provincial and local security bureaus that have helped construct what amounts to a police state in East Turkestan. 

These entities have been involved “in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance,” the filing said.
The move was announced just days before high-level Chinese and American officials meet in Washington to try to resolve a trade war that has begun mounting pain on China.
The blacklist’s impact on the companies is likely to be mixed.
In many cases, they could find ways to replace American components and have likely already stockpiled key parts, limiting the short-term impact.
Over the longer term, it could hamper their access to United States and European markets, as well as damage recruitment efforts. 

American customers, universities and others will likely look askance at striking up relations with Chinese companies on the blacklist.
A Commerce Department spokesman said Monday that the action was not related to those talks. 

But the decision is likely to rankle the Chinese government, which has helped support some of these companies as they have developed into cutting-edge technology firms.
“The U.S. government and Department of Commerce cannot and will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement.
Hikvision said in a statement that it strongly opposed the decision and had been trying to address the administration’s concerns for the past year. 

The punishment will “hurt Hikvision’s U.S. business partners,” the company said.
China has faced growing condemnation from human rights groups in recent months for its detention of up to one million ethnic Uighurs and other minority Muslims in large internment camps in East Turkestan.
Beijing has constructed an advanced surveillance system, in what it describes as an effort to fight Islamic extremism among the Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in East Turkestan. 

But Uighurs and others around the world say Chinese officials are trying to suppress their culture and religion.

Human Rights Watch has said the violations are of a “scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called China’s treatment of the Uighurs the “stain of the century.”
Yet administration officials have wavered on how much to keep human rights and economic concerns separate in their negotiations with China. 

Many officials emphasize that the topics are separate, but the administration has shelved several proposals that would have shined light on China’s abuses over concerns that a tough stance could upset trade talks. 

And President Trump himself has often linked national security and other concerns to trade talks.
On Monday, President Trump said “bad” action in Hong Kong, the site of violent protests, would hurt progress on trade and urged China to find a “humane solution.”
“I think they’re coming to make a deal,” he said of the Chinese. 

“It’s got to be a fair deal.”
The Trump administration has steadily ratcheted up pressure on China through tariffs on more than $360 billion of Chinese products and other restrictions on Chinese investment in the United States. The administration has also begun looking to restrict exports to China.
This year, the administration placed Huawei, the Chinese telecom equipment giant, on the blacklist, saying it posed national security concerns. 

It added five Chinese entities to the list in June, also citing national security.
American companies can still apply for licenses to supply products to organizations that have been placed on the Commerce Department entity list, but the government may deny the applications.
The companies on the list help illustrate the breadth and development of China’s surveillance industry, which increasingly uses predictive technology to track its own citizens, or spot potential protests or crimes as they occur.
The new additions include several artificial intelligence start-ups: Megvii, SenseTime and Yitu Technologies. 

They also include iFlytek, which makes voice recognition software; Xiamen Meiya Pico Information Company, a data forensics company; and Yixin Science and Technology Company, which makes nanotechnology.
The listed government entities include East Turkestan’s public security bureau and 19 subordinate bureaus and institutes.
Several of the firms have grown into global operations while servicing an extensive market in China. Hikvision said it had more than 34,000 employees and dozens of divisions worldwide, and it has supplied products to the Beijing Olympics, the World Cup in Brazil and Linate Airport in Milan. Dahua Technologies has more than 16,000 employees, according to its website, with divisions in North America, Europe and Latin America.
The companies run the gamut in terms of capabilities and focus. 

Some are specialists in facial-recognition systems, voice-recognition software, surveillance cameras and phone tracking systems that are sold largely to China’s security forces. 

Others have ambitions of building systems that can filter social media content and products that could help doctors reach cancer diagnoses.
As a result, the impact of the bans will be varied. 

For the surveillance camera maker Hikvision, which makes a significant portion of the world’s security cameras, the impact could be significant. 

A block could have a roughly 10 percent impact on revenue, technology research firm Sanford Bernstein said in a Monday note. 

While the company would have to replace some American-made chips placed in its high-end cameras, most of the impact would come on the back-end servers that help analyze footage as part of its security systems.
The impact could be larger in terms of broader sales ambitions. 

Hikvision has worked to court the American market, including a number of government-connected customers.
For those focused on artificial-intelligence software, like Yitu and Megvii, the direct hit could be small. 

Nonetheless, the blacklist could impact them in other ways. 

The artificial intelligence start-ups on the list have partnerships with American software firms, connections to American universities and have been active in trying to hire foreign talent. 

In all those cases, the blocks will likely hamper their efforts.

Tech War

U.S. Blacklists More Chinese Tech Companies Over National Security Concerns

By Ana Swanson, Paul Mozur and Steve Lohr


WASHINGTON — The Trump administration added five Chinese entities to a United States blacklist on Friday, further restricting China’s access to American technology before a planned meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping in Japan next week.
The Commerce Department announced that it would add four Chinese companies and one Chinese institute to an “entity list,” saying they posed risks to American national security or foreign policy interests. 

The move essentially bars them from buying American technology and components without a waiver from the United States government, which could all but cripple them because of their reliance on American chips and other technology to make advanced electronics.
The entities are one of China’s leading supercomputer makers, Sugon; three subsidiaries set up to design microchips, Higon, Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit and Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology; and the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology. 

They lead China’s development of high-performance computing, some of which is used in military applications like simulating nuclear explosions.
Other Chinese companies that have been barred from access to American technology include the telecom equipment giant Huawei, which was added to the entity list in May. 

The Trump administration is also considering adding Hikvision, a surveillance-technology company, The New York Times has reported.
The restriction of additional companies could further complicate efforts to reach a trade deal. American and Chinese officials recently restarted talks after negotiations collapsed in May, with President Trump accusing China of breaking a previous deal and the two countries intensifying their tariff fight.
This week, President Trump said he would have an “extended meeting” with Chinese Xi at the Group of 20 summit next week in Osaka, Japan — a conversation that could determine whether the trade war ends or persists indefinitely.
A fast resolution to the trade war was already looking unlikely. 

Both sides have escalated their language on remaining tough in trade talks, and China has said it is putting together its own “unreliable entities list” of foreign companies and people, an apparent first step toward retaliating against the denial of vital American technology to Chinese companies.
The United States has begun targeting Chinese tech companies that rely on American products as it seeks to thwart China’s efforts to dominate advanced technologies that could have military applications.
Supercomputing is one of the key technologies of the future that China is seeking to dominate, in addition to artificial intelligence and quantum computing. 

America is home to the world’s fastest computer, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, but China is building more of the ultrafast machines than any other country.
Sugon is one of China’s most important makers of high-performance computers and servers. 

The machines serve China’s government and its largest technology companies, powering everything from military simulations to weather prediction.
In most cases, Chinese computers rely on a mix of microchips from the American manufacturers Intel and Nvidia. 

By placing Sugon on the list, the Trump administration is effectively cutting it off from the tiny brains it needs to make the billions of calculations required to model weather patterns and support video apps and online shopping.
One of the blacklisted subsidiaries had formed a partnership with the American chip maker Advanced Micro Devices to create microchips that could satisfy security demands for Chinese government customers. 

Some Chinese officials said the chips could be used in a new generation of faster supercomputers. 

By relying on chips made by AMD and Intel, Sugon’s supercomputers can run a wider array of software than some of the country’s faster computers built around domestically produced chips.
With just over $1 billion in revenue last year, Sugon is tiny compared with the previously blacklisted Huawei. 

Still, its exclusion from American technology is an especially bitter pill for Beijing to swallow, as its supercomputers form the core of some of the Chinese government’s most sensitive and important systems.
Sugon supercomputers support State Grid, the monopoly that runs China’s electric grid; China Mobile, the country’s largest telecom services provider; and the China Meteorological Administration. 

It also makes data centers for companies like the e-commerce giant JD.com and Bytedance, the owner of the social media app TikTok.
The companies could petition the United States government for a license to buy American technology, but their addition to the list suggests that they would receive intense scrutiny and that approval might be unlikely.
For years, chip companies like Intel have sold widely available microchips to supercomputer makers in China, even some with close ties to the military. 

In 2015, the Commerce Department moved to add China’s National University of Defense and Technology to the entity list, to cut it off from using Intel chips in supercomputers that were being used to model nuclear detonations.
On Friday, the list was updated with a number of new addresses and names through which the National University of Defense Technology was procuring chips. 

According to China’s official list of its fastest supercomputers, the institute still runs two of China’s three fastest supercomputers on Intel processors.
In its current order, the Commerce Department highlights the next frontier in supercomputing: “exascale” machines, which China, the United States and other nations are racing to build. 

They will be five times as fast as the fastest machine today — the Summit, which is housed at Oak Ridge and was built by IBM in a partnership with Nvidia.
The Commerce Department order cites the three groups “leading China’s development of exascale high-performance computing”: Sugon, the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology and the National University of Defense Technology.
These three companies are all developing prototype exascale machines in China that are powered by Chinese-made microprocessors, said Jack Dongarra, a supercomputer expert at the University of Tennessee and a co-creator of the Top 500 list of the swiftest machines.
But other key technologies in the fastest supercomputers will be affected. 

Supercomputers are made by lashing together thousands of processors, linked by a specialized fabric of digital circuitry known as interconnect technology. 

The leading producer of high-performance interconnect technology is Mellanox, an Israeli company that Nvidia agreed this year to buy for $6.9 billion.
“The interconnect technology is as important if not more important than the processors,” Mr. Dongarra said. 

“The impact of this government order is going to be far-reaching.”
It is likely to hamper the Chinese in the short run, he said, but also encourage China to redouble its efforts to replace American technology.

Trade War

President Trump planning more restrictions on tech exports to China

By ADAM BEHSUDI


The Trump administration is taking steps toward issuing even more restrictions on exports of high-tech goods to China as the U.S. ratchets up its trade war with Beijing, according to two people familiar with the plans.
The Commerce Department will soon recommend rolling back regulations making it easier for U.S. companies to export certain goods that have both civilian and military purposes, the people said. Commerce will also recommend ending a general policy of approving export licenses for that group of goods if they go to civilian use and instead require reviews on a case-by-case basis.
The expected moves would make it harder for China to acquire U.S. technology. 

They come on top of actions President Donald Trump has taken since U.S.-China trade talks ground to a halt earlier this month, such as raising tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. 

His administration also put Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei on a trade blacklist and is considering similar actions against other Chinese tech companies.
How President Trump is willing to use these actions as leverage could become clearer next month when he may meet with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in late June on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan, though no formal plans have been set.

“It seems to me we’re still turning up the pressure to try to get a deal,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser and China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Commerce is drafting the recommendations as part of a review required by an export-control law recently passed by Congress. 

A Commerce spokesperson said the department is finalizing the review, which has a May 10 deadline, but declined to confirm specific actions the administration is weighing.
Commerce is considering at least four regulatory actions targeting China under the Export Control Reform Act, said the two people, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deliberations.
Two of those options would involve revoking two license exceptions U.S. companies can get for shipping restricted technology to China. 

U.S. firms can avoid an export license requirement to China if they can prove the good is bound for civilian end-use or if a U.S.-origin good is approved for re-export to China from an allied third country.
Another option would be expanding a prohibition on any U.S. goods bound for military use in China on par with restrictions now applied to Russia and Venezuela.
Finally, Commerce could look at changing its general policy of approving export licenses for goods bound for civilian uses.
One of the people close to the deliberations said the actions appear to be “a direct response to the civilian-military fusion that is happening in China.”
The U.S. already maintains relatively tight restrictions on exports to China of technology and goods that have both civilian and military uses. 

Tough U.S. export controls aimed at China have long riled Beijing and Chinese officials have raised objection to mounting restrictions with previous administrations.
The additional restrictions would add to the recent Commerce Department decision to blacklist Huawei, forcing most of the company’s U.S. suppliers to obtain a special license for export transactions. 

Commerce has a general policy of denying license applications for blacklisted companies.
The Commerce Department is also considering similar action against a number of other Chinese companies, including Hikvision and Dahua Technology, which manufacture sophisticated video surveillance technology, according to the two people familiar with the plans.
Those companies have been implicated in human rights abuses as a result of the monitoring and mass detention of members of the Muslim Uighur group in China’s East Turkestan colony.
Any final actions related to the surveillance companies are complicated by the scope of a broader proposed package of sanctions the administration is considering. 

Officials are looking at using a law that would allow the U.S. to ban Chinese government and business officials accused of human rights abuses in the region from entering the U.S. or holding assets in America, said a lobbyist familiar with the matter.
“There is broad disagreement over both timing and which tools to use here,” the lobbyist said. 

“In any case, this will really piss off Beijing.”
The Trump administration had held back on several actions — including punishing China for its activities in East Turkestan as well as Huawei’s blacklisting — in the hopes that a deal could be reached with Xi to draw down trade tension. 

But talks fell apart earlier this month amid accusations from U.S. officials that Beijing had backtracked on commitments to codify under domestic law obligations to address intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers.
“China’s backtracking in a massive way at the eleventh hour from four months of shuttle diplomacy has fed a view in the administration that there is no reason to hold back from these types of actions,” said one person close to the internal deliberations.

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

How China Uses Hikvision and Huawei to Subdue Minorities

By Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur

Xi Jinping looming large on a screen in Kashgar, in the East Turkestan colony. As many as one million members of Muslim ethnic minorities are held in concentration camps in East Turkestan.

KASHGAR, East Turkestan — A God’s-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents. 

At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.
To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. 

The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.
The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of East Turkestan, the troubled colony where Kashgar is located.
This is the vision of high-tech surveillance — precise, all-seeing, infallible — that China’s leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making East Turkestan an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that will spread across the country and beyond.
It is also a vision that some of President Trump’s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. 

Beyond market barriers, theft and national security, China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad — and that the United States must stop it.

How China Turned a City Into a Prison. Children are interrogated. Neighbors become informants. Mosques are monitored. Cameras are everywhere.

Developed and sold by the China Electronics Technology Corporation (C.E.T.C.), a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for technology that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in East Turkestan.

Treating a city like a battlefield, the platform was designed to “apply the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian public security,” Wang Pengda, a C.E.T.C. engineer, said in an official blog post. “Looking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time.”
The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.
On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.”

Pictures from presentations by the China Electronics Technology Corporation at recent industry shows.

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring East Turkestan for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36 percent of East Turkestan’s population.
It is a virtual cage that complements the concentration camps in East Turkestan where the authorities have detained a million or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. 

The program helps identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them when they are released.
President Trump administration is considering whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the East Turkestan effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying American technology. Hikvision is a major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the world and across East Turkestan, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and concentration camps. 

C.E.T.C. owns about 42 percent of Hikvision through subsidiaries.
“East Turkestan is maybe a kind of more extreme, more intrusive example of China’s mass surveillance systems,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the region. 

“These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose — to target Muslims.”

Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall.

Virtual fences
In the city of Kashgar, with a population of 720,000 — about 85 percent of them Uighur — the C.E.T.C. platform draws on databases with 68 billion records, including those on people’s movements and activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.
By comparison, the F.B.I.’s national instant criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end of 2018.
The police in East Turkestan use a mobile app, made by C.E.T.C. for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter information into the databases.
Human Rights Watch, which obtained and analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an “unusual” amount of electricity.
The app, which the Times examined, also allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going from home, or have refueled someone else’s car.
The police use the app at checkpoints that serve as virtual “fences” across East Turkestan. 

If someone is tagged as a potential threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.
“The government’s arbitrary power is reflected, or coded, in the app,” Ms. Wang said, adding that the system “is programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness.”
Intelligence agencies in many countries use sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. 

But China has taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in East Turkestan as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms, including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.
The Chinese government has defended the surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says the indoctrination camps in East Turkestan are job training centers. 

Hikvision has denied “any inappropriate actions in East Turkestan,” and C.E.T.C. declined to comment when reached by phone.
C.E.T.C. traces its roots to the military research labs that helped build China’s first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided missile. 

Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create a version of Windows that meets the government’s internal security requirements.
In recent years, it turned to East Turkestan.
The Communist Party, which took control of the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on Chinese targets. 

State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.
The real bonanza of security contracts came after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal security in East Turkestan totaled nearly $8.4 billion in 2017, six times as much as in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the concentration camps.
Hikvision has received contracts in East Turkestan worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems. 

Another company tapping into East Turkestan’s security gold rush is Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. 

It signed an agreement last year with the region’s police department to help officers analyze data.

A checkpoint in Hotan last year.

The multilayered program to harvest information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and cities across East Turkestan in buildings that look like toll plazas.
Instead of coins, they collect personal information.
On a recent visit to one checkpoint in Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by C.E.T.C. and swiped their identity cards.
“Head up,” the machines chimed as they photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.
There are smaller checkpoints at banks, parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from identity cards in the mass surveillance database.
Identification cards are also needed to buy knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. 

The purchases are entered into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals, according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.
Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience. 

At many checkpoints, privileged groups — Han Chinese, Uighur officials with passes, and foreign visitors — are waved through “green channels.” 

In this way, the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same streets — and in the online police databases — one for Muslim minorities, the other for Han Chinese.

“The goal here is instilling fear — fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,” said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about East Turkestan as well as China’s surveillance state. 

“The amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect.”
A database stored online by SenseNets, a Chinese surveillance company, and examined by the Times suggests the scale of surveillance in East Turkestan: It contained facial recognition records and ID scans for about 2.5 million people, mostly in Urumqi, a city with a population of about 3.5 million.
“This can be pulled off by anyone, and that’s the part that worries me,” said Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher and co-founder of GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes internet security.
According to Mr. Gevers, who discovered the unsecured database, the online records indicate that a network of about 10,000 checkpoints in Urumqi made more than six million identifications in 24 hours.
The authorities in East Turkestan also force residents to install an app known as “Clean Net Guard” on their phones to monitor for content that the government deems suspicious.
Kashgar and other areas of East Turkestan have in recent years systematically collected DNA and other biological data from residents too, especially Muslims. 

Officials now collect blood, fingerprints, voice recordings, head portraits from multiple angles, and scans of irises, which can provide a unique identifier like fingerprints.
These databases are not yet completely integrated, and despite the futuristic gloss of the East Turkestan surveillance state, the authorities rely on hundreds of thousands of police officers, officials and neighborhood monitors to gather and enter data.
“We risk understating the extent to which this high-tech police state continues to require a lot of manpower,” said Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has studied security spending in East Turkestan. 

“It is the combination of manpower and technology that makes the 21st-century police state so powerful.”

Security gates at the entrance to a Kashgar mosque in 2016.

Expanding beyond the colony
East Turkestan’s security and surveillance systems are already attracting admirers from the rest of China. 

Delegations of police officers from other provinces and cities have visited Kashgar and other cities to admire — and consider adopting — the measures.
They often visit police command centers where rows of officers peer at computers, scanning surveillance video feeds and information on residents on the C.E.T.C. platform.
“The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in East Turkestan,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China, said during a visit to East Turkestan last year, according to an official report on the website of the city’s police bureau.
East Turkestan’s high-tech policing, he added, was “something we should vigorously study.”
Zhejiang and Guangdong, two wealthy provinces on China’s southeastern coast, have been testing the C.E.T.C. surveillance system used in East Turkestan, “laying a robust foundation for a nationwide rollout,” the company said last year.
C.E.T.C. has also signed an agreement with the police in the southern city of Shenzhen to provide an advanced “command center information system” similar to the one in East Turkestan.
The technology has some way to go. 

Dust and bad lighting can hobble facial recognition on security cameras, which struggle to track large numbers of people simultaneously. 

Even the best systems can be accurate in less than 20 percent of cases, according to one study published by a journal linked to the Ministry of Public Security.
A technician who until recently installed and maintained computers for the authorities in East Turkestan said police surveillance centers relied on hundreds of workers to monitor cameras, an expensive and inefficient undertaking.
And outside urban centers, police officers often do not have the skills to operate the sophisticated systems, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions for speaking to a journalist.
The spending spree on security in East Turkestan has left local governments across the region with staggering bills, raising questions about how the authorities can keep the systems running.
In Kashgar, for example, the county of Yengisar warned this year of a “huge shortfall” from spending on security and said that it had accumulated 1 billion renminbi, or about $150 million, in previously undeclared “invisible debt.”
“The pressure from ensuring basic spending for additional staff and to maintain stability is extraordinary,” it said.
Still, the region’s leaders told officials this year that they must not wind back spending.
“Preserving stability is a hard-and-fast task that takes priority over everything else,” the leadership said in the region’s annual budget report. 

“Use every possible means to find funds so that the high-pressure offensive does not let up.”

East Turkestan Executioner

President Trump Could Blacklist China’s Hikvision, a Surveillance Firm
By Ana Swanson and Edward Wong

A worker installing Hikvision surveillance cameras in a park in Beijing in February.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering limits to a Chinese video surveillance giant’s ability to buy American technology, people familiar with the matter said, the latest attempt to counter Beijing’s global economic ambitions.
The move would effectively place the company, Hikvision, on a United States blacklist.

It also would mark the first time the Trump administration punished a Chinese company for its role in the surveillance and mass detention of Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority.
The move is also likely to inflame the tensions that have escalated in President Trump’s renewed trade war with Chinese leaders. 

The president, in the span of two weeks, has raised tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, threatened to tax all imports and taken steps to cripple the Chinese telecom equipment giant Huawei. China has promised to retaliate against American industries.
Hikvision is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance products and is central to China’s ambitions to be the top global exporter of surveillance systems. 

The Commerce Department may require that American companies obtain government approval to supply components to Hikvision, limiting the company’s access to technology that helps power its equipment.
Administration officials could make a final decision in the coming weeks.
The combination of more traditional surveillance equipment with new technologies, like artificial intelligence, speech monitoring and genetic testing, is helping make monitoring networks increasingly effective — and intrusive. 

Hikvision says its products enable their clients to track people around the country by their facial features, body characteristics or gait, or to monitor activity considered unusual by officials, such as people suddenly running or crowds gathering.
China poses an economic, technological and geopolitical threat that cannot be left unchecked. 

The United States has targeted Chinese technology companies like Huawei that poses a national security threat given deep ties between the Chinese government and industry and laws that could require Chinese firms to hand over information if asked.
Adding to those concerns are the global human rights implications of China’s extensive surveillance industry, which it increasingly uses to keep tabs on its own citizens. 

The Chinese have used surveillance technology, including facial recognition systems and closed-circuit television cameras, to target the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, who have accused the Chinese government of discriminating against their culture and religion.
China has constructed a police state in the country’s northwest colony of East Turkestan, which is Uighurs' homeland. 

That includes extensive surveillance powered by companies like Hikvision and barbed wire-ringed internment compounds that hold 800,000 to as many as three million Muslims.
China has begun exporting this technology to nations that seek closer surveillance of their citizens, including Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Since last year, administration officials have debated what to do about China’s attempts to clamp down on the cultural and religious practices of the Uighurs. 

But they have refrained from taking action, in part because some American officials worried a move would derail attempts to win a trade deal with China.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News on May 2 that the administration was concerned “that the Chinese are working to put their systems in networks all across the world so they can steal your information and my information.” 

He mentioned the Muslim internment camps, adding, “This is stuff that is reminiscent of the 1930s that present a real challenge to the United States, and this administration is prepared to take this on.”
Since trade talks with Beijing nearly crumbled early this month, the administration has quickly ramped up economic pressure on China. 

It is moving ahead with plans to tax an additional $300 billion in products, and announced a sweeping executive order cutting off Huawei from purchasing the American software and semiconductors it needs to make its products. 

While American companies can try to obtain a license to continue doing business with Huawei, firms like Google are making plans to curtail the products and services that they supply.
The administration is also attempting to prosecute a top Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, who faces criminal charges in the United States and is under house arrest in Canada, where she awaits a court decision on extradition.

The Trump administration is considering adding Hikvision to an “entity list” that could limit its ability to buy American technology.

The measure against Hikvision would operate similarly to Huawei’s license requirement.
The Commerce Department would place it on an “entity list,” which requires designated foreign companies and American companies to get United States government approval before they do business with one another.
“Taking this step would be a tangible signal to both U.S. and foreign companies that the U.S. government is looking carefully at what is happening in East Turkestan and is willing to take action in response,” said Jessica Batke, a former State Department official who has done research in Xinjiang and testified before Congress on the issue.
“At the same time, however, the ongoing trade war perhaps undercuts the perception that this is coming from a place of purely human rights concerns.”
The Commerce Department and the White House declined to comment.
Hikvision is little known in the United States, but the company supplies large parts of China’s extensive surveillance system. 
The company’s products include traffic cameras, thermal cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles, and they now allow Chinese security agencies to monitor railway stations, roads and other sites.
It is not immediately clear what effect a United States ban would have on Hikvision’s business.
The company appears to source just a small portion of its components from the United States, and any such ban could speed its efforts to switch to Chinese suppliers.
But Hikvision does have a growing international presence, and its executives have warned in the past about the potential for rising anti-China sentiment in the United States to affect its operations.
The company says it has more than 34,000 global employees and dozens of divisions worldwide, and it has supplied products to the Beijing Olympics, the Brazilian World Cup and the Linate Airport in Milan.
It has tried to expand into North America in recent years, employing hundreds of workers in the United States and Canada, setting up offices in California and building a North American research and development team headquartered in Montreal.
Members of Congress from both parties have called on the administration to impose sanctions on companies involved in aiding China’s persecution of Muslims, including Hikvision. 
In an August 2018 letter, legislators also urged the Commerce Department to strengthen its controls over technology exported to these companies, and called on the government to increase disclosure requirements for publicly traded companies that might be complicit in human rights abuses.
Hikvision and Dahua, another company cited by lawmakers, are both listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange.
MSCI, one of the largest index providers in the United States, added Hikvision to its benchmark emerging markets index last year.
UBS and J. P. Morgan are among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to Hikvision.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, said in an interview that the House Intelligence Committee, which he leads, could scrutinize more closely American companies that are investing in or partnering with Chinese firms that are building up the Chinese surveillance state.
Congress and the administration have responded with other measures that may clamp down on Hikvision’s business.
Congress included a provision in its 2019 military spending authorization bill that banned federal agencies from using Chinese video surveillance products made by Hikvision or Dahua.
The Trump administration is also considering imposing sanctions on specific Chinese officials known to play critical roles in the surveillance and detention system in East Turkestan.
These sanctions would be imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act.
The highest-ranking official being considered for this type of targeted sanction is Chen Quanguo, a member of the party’s Politburo and party chief of East Turkestan since August 2016.
The State Department and White House National Security Council support imposing the sanctions, but officials at the Treasury Department have pushed back, citing a desire not to upset the trade talks, even though those have bogged down.
Pro-China Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has advocated maintaining strong business ties with China.
The Commerce Department is also working on new restrictions on the types of potentially sensitive American technology that can be exported to foreign businesses, which are likely to touch on artificial intelligence and 5G abilities.

Die Endlösung der Uigurischefrage

Chinese surveillance firm's stock plunges after reports of possible US ban

By Sherisse Pham

Hong Kong -- Shares in Chinese surveillance company Hikvision plunged on Wednesday, following a report that the Trump administration is mulling slapping it with a US export ban.
Hikvision stock plummeted the daily limit of 10% during early morning trading in Shenzhen. 

It recovered some of those losses to close about 6% lower.
The drop came after the New York Times reported that the United States is considering placing the Chinese surveillance technology firm on a trade blacklist, citing people familiar with the matter.
The move would be Washington's latest attempt to curb Beijing's tech ambitions, and a further escalation of the US-China trade war.
Huawei is the first big casualty of China's war with America

"Hikvision takes these concerns very seriously and has engaged with the US government regarding all of this since last October," a company spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.
The US Department of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
Hikvision manufactures surveillance cameras and security products powered by artificial intelligence. 

The company says its products can track people using facial recognition or physical characteristics such as gait, count the number of people who visit specific areas, and detect "unusual behavior like a violent action."

Hikvision has faced international criticism for its surveillance deals in Tibet and East Turkestan, with US lawmakers last year urging sanctions against the company and accusing it of helping China create a "high-tech police state."
The Chinese government has stepped up surveillance in the country's East Turkestan colony as part of a crackdown on the region's Uyghur Muslim population. 

Its presence in Tibet, an internationally recognized autonomous region, is also disputed by the Tibetan population and has boiled over into large scale riots in the past.
The US move on Hikvision would be similar to the restrictions placed on Chinese tech giant Huawei last week. 

The US Department of Commerce would place Hikvision on a list of foreign firms deemed to undermine American national security or foreign policy interests. 

Listed companies are barred from receiving components and software unless the trade is licensed.
Hikvision buys computer chips and components from US companies such as Nvidia, Western Digital, Intel and Seagate.
Brokerage firm Jefferies said in a note Wednesday that a US ban would not hit Hikvision as hard as it did Huawei. 

The company can buy critical parts for its artificial intelligence products from local distributors, said Jefferies analyst Rex Wu.
In a note last month, Wu said he expects Hikvision's annual revenue to be boosted by "China's central government procurement platform," noting that "East Turkestan's public security budget for 2019 is still rising" compared to a year earlier.

Rogue Investment

Think twice about your investment portfolio. It likely undermines human rights in China.
By Marion Smith

Rushan Abbas, 51, of Herndon, Va., holds a photo of her sister, Gulshan Abbas, last year in Washington. Her sister is among the many Uighurs detained by China. 

Does your retirement plan or investment portfolio undermine human rights in China?

For millions of Americans, the answer is yes. 

They unwittingly hold or benefit from investments in companies that enable the Chinese Communist Party’s oppression and imprisonment of the Uighur people.
Consider two Chinese firms, Hikvision and Dahua Technology. 

They supply about one-third of the world’s security cameras, but in their home country, both companies have received government contracts — totaling more than $1 billion — to install a vast surveillance apparatus in the western colony of East Turkestan. 

“The projects include not only security cameras but also video analytics hubs, intelligent monitoring systems, big data centers, police checkpoints, and even drones,” Charles Rollet wrote in June in Foreign Policy.
Beijing has deployed the system to try to control the predominantly Muslim Uighurs, viewed by the Communist Party as a threat to its power in that region. 

The surveillance equipment helps authorities identify supposedly dangerous individuals, many of whom are then shipped to concentration camps that Beijing calls “vocational training centers.” 

Of a total population of about 11 million, 2 million Uighurs may have been thus imprisoned.
In these camps, Uighurs are subjected to torture and brainwashing intended to eradicate their culture and force them to embrace communist ideology. 

The Post’s editorial board has decried this “massive campaign of cultural extermination.”
For their part, Hikvision and Dahua have not directly addressed their involvement in Beijing’s surveillance of the Uighurs. 

The companies have pointed with pride to their contribution to "anti-terrorism" efforts generally, and Hikvision last year lamented how “Western media” has distorted its image with “alarmist headlines.”
But the surveillance state that Beijing has established in East Turkestan would not be possible without the companies’ help. 

Most Americans would not willingly support companies that enabled such oppression, but many investment funds and state pension plans own shares in Hikvision and Dahua Technology, likely without individual investors’ knowledge.
The investments occur through several different channels. 

Most directly, U.S.-based funds purchase shares of the two companies. 

The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) owned more than 26,000 Hikvision shares at the end of last year. 

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), which represents nearly 1 million members and beneficiaries, owned more than 4.3 millionshares in Hikvision as of last June. 

NYSTRS did not respond to a request for comment. 

A CalSTRS spokesperson said they are “researching the issues surrounding the company.”
Another path for investment comes through the influential MSCI Emerging Markets Index. 

Many funds invest directly in the index, while others follow its portfolio. 

The MSCI index is currently tracked by $2 trillion in assets. 

The index added Chinese A-Class shares from both Hikvision and Dahua last year. 

Any time a fund invests in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, it buys positions in both businesses.
Through both active and passive investment funds, Americans also hold stock or bonds in many other questionable or dangerous Chinese companies, including subsidiaries of firms affiliated with the Chinese military. 

According to RWR Advisory Group, U.S. investment funds rarely conduct due diligence to identify and avoid companies complicit in human rights abuses or connected to China’s defense industry. 

The Financial Times reports that public attention to their investments in Hikvision has prompted at least seven U.S. equity funds to divest from the company, but the better path is to be proactive, not reactive.
Fortunately, the U.S. government and lawmakers can force change.
In the short term, Congress should hold hearings on Chinese companies suspected of aiding Beijing’s sinister activities while benefiting from U.S. financial markets. 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) deserves credit for bringing this matter to his colleagues’ attention. 

Longer term, Congress could pass legislation creating the equivalent of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which determines whether foreign acquisitions of American firms pose a national security risk. 

The White House could also direct the National Security Council, the Treasury Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to establish a screening mechanism for Chinese entrants into U.S. capital markets.
Outside of Washington, each state should commission a report on all Chinese debt and equity holdings in its public-pension systems and other state investment portfolios. 

For their part, pension funds should immediately divest from Chinese companies and their subsidiaries — as well as funds such as the MSCI Emerging Markets Index that include them — if they facilitate human rights abuses or otherwise undermine U.S. values and interests.
Americans deserve to be able to invest with confidence that the free-enterprise system isn’t being exploited to fund communist tyranny. 

Buying stock in Chinese companies complicit in the terror against Uighur people might earn plenty of money, but it’s a bad investment.

One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a Minority

In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.
By Paul Mozur

SenseTime is among the Chinese artificial intelligence companies developing facial recognition technology.

The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps.
Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.
The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. 

The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.
The technology and its use to keep tabs on China’s 11 million Uighurs were described by five people with direct knowledge of the systems, who requested anonymity because they feared retribution. 

The New York Times also reviewed databases used by the police, government procurement documents and advertising materials distributed by the A.I. companies that make the systems.
Chinese authorities already maintain a vast surveillance net, including tracking people’s DNA, in the western region of East Turkestan, which many Uighurs call home. 

But the scope of the new systems, previously unreported, extends that monitoring into many other corners of the country.

Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall. Members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority have been under Chinese surveillance and persecution for years.

The police are now using facial recognition technology to target Uighurs in wealthy eastern cities like Hangzhou and Wenzhou and across the coastal province of Fujian, said two of the people. 

Law enforcement in the central Chinese city of Sanmenxia, along the Yellow River, ran a system that over the course of a month this year screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times.
Police documents show demand for such capabilities is spreading. 

Almost two dozen police departments in 16 different provinces and regions across China sought such technology beginning in 2018, according to procurement documents. 

Law enforcement from the central province of Shaanxi, for example, aimed to acquire a smart camera system last year that “should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.”
Some police departments and technology companies described the practice as “minority identification,” though three of the people said that phrase was a euphemism for a tool that sought to identify Uighurs exclusively. 

Uighurs often look distinct from China’s majority Han population, more closely resembling people from Central Asia. 

Such differences make it easier for software to single them out.
For decades, democracies have had a near monopoly on cutting-edge technology. 

Today, a new generation of start-ups catering to Beijing’s authoritarian needs are beginning to set the tone for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. 

Similar tools could automate biases based on skin color and ethnicity elsewhere.
“Take the most risky application of this technology, and chances are good someone is going to try it,” said Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. 

“If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.”
From a technology standpoint, using algorithms to label people based on race or ethnicity has become relatively easy. 

Companies like I.B.M. advertise software that can sort people into broad groups.
But China has broken new ground by identifying one ethnic group for law enforcement purposes. One Chinese start-up, CloudWalk, outlined a sample experience in marketing its own surveillance systems. 

The technology, it said, could recognize “sensitive groups of people.”

A screen shot from the CloudWalk website details a possible use for its facial recognition technology. One of them: recognizing “sensitive groups of people.”

A translation of marketing material for CloudWalk’s facial recognition technology.

“If originally one Uighur lives in a neighborhood, and within 20 days six Uighurs appear,” it said on its website, “it immediately sends alarms” to law enforcement.
In practice, the systems are imperfect, two of the people said. 

Often, their accuracy depends on environmental factors like lighting and the positioning of cameras.
In the United States and Europe, the debate in the artificial intelligence community has focused on the unconscious biases of those designing the technology. 

Recent tests showed facial recognition systems made by companies like I.B.M. and Amazon were less accurate at identifying the features of darker-skinned people.
China’s efforts raise starker issues. 

While facial recognition technology uses aspects like skin tone and face shapes to sort images in photos or videos, it must be told by humans to categorize people based on social definitions of race or ethnicity. 

Chinese police, with the help of the start-ups, have done that.
“It’s something that seems shocking coming from the U.S., where there is most likely racism built into our algorithmic decision making, but not in an overt way like this,” said Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

“There’s not a system designed to identify someone as African-American, for example.”
The Chinese A.I. companies behind the software include Yitu, Megvii, SenseTime, and CloudWalk, which are each valued at more than $1 billion. 

Another company, Hikvision, that sells cameras and software to process the images, offered a minority recognition function, but began phasing it out in 2018, according to one of the people.
The companies’ valuations soared in 2018 as China’s Ministry of Public Security, its top police agency, set aside billions of dollars under two government plans, called Skynet and Sharp Eyes, to computerize surveillance, policing and intelligence collection.
In a statement, a SenseTime spokeswoman said she checked with “relevant teams,” who were not aware its technology was being used to profile. 

Megvii said in a statement it was focused on “commercial not political solutions,” adding, “we are concerned about the well-being and safety of individual citizens, not about monitoring groups.” CloudWalk and Yitu did not respond to requests for comment.
China’s Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
Selling products with names like Fire Eye, Sky Eye and Dragonfly Eye, the start-ups promise to use A.I. to analyze footage from China’s surveillance cameras. 

The technology is not mature — in 2017 Yitu promoted a one-in-three success rate when the police responded to its alarms at a train station — and many of China’s cameras are not powerful enough for facial recognition software to work effectively.
Yet they help advance China’s architecture for social control. 

To make the algorithms work, the police have put together face-image databases for people with criminal records, mental illnesses, records of drug use, and those who petitioned the government over grievances, according to two of the people and procurement documents. 

A national database of criminals at large includes about 300,000 faces, while a list of people with a history of drug use in the city of Wenzhou totals 8,000 faces, they said.

A security camera in a rebuilt section of the Old City in Kashgar, East Turkestan.

Using a process called machine learning, engineers feed data to artificial intelligence systems to train them to recognize patterns or traits. 

In the case of the profiling, they would provide thousands of labeled images of both Uighurs and non-Uighurs. 

That would help generate a function to distinguish the ethnic group.
The A.I. companies have taken money from major investors. 

Fidelity International and Qualcomm Ventures were a part of a consortium that invested $620 million in SenseTime. 

Sequoia invested in Yitu. 

Megvii is backed by Sinovation Ventures, the fund of the well-known Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.
A Sinovation spokeswoman said the fund had recently sold a part of its stake in Megvii and relinquished its seat on the board. 

Fidelity declined to comment. 

Sequoia and Qualcomm did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
Lee, a booster of Chinese A.I., has argued that China has an advantage in developing A.I. because its leaders are less fussed by “legal intricacies” or “moral consensus.”
“We are not passive spectators in the story of A.I. — we are the authors of it,” Lee wrote last year. 

“That means the values underpinning our visions of an A.I. future could well become self-fulfilling prophecies.” 

He declined to comment on his fund’s investment in Megvii or its practices.
Ethnic profiling within China’s tech industry isn’t a secret, the people said. 

It has become so common that one of the people likened it to the short-range wireless technology Bluetooth. 

Employees at Megvii were warned about the sensitivity of discussing ethnic targeting publicly, another person said.
China has devoted major resources toward tracking Uighurs, citing ethnic violence in East Turkestan and Uighur terrorist attacks elsewhere. 

Beijing has thrown hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and others in East Turkestan into concentration camps.
The software extends the state’s ability to label Uighurs to the rest of the country. 

One national database stores the faces of all Uighurs who leave East Turkestan, according to two of the people.
Government procurement documents from the past two years also show demand has spread. 

In the city of Yongzhou in southern Hunan Province, law enforcement officials sought software to “characterize and search whether or not someone is a Uighur,” according to one document.
In two counties in Guizhou Province, the police listed a need for Uighur classification. 

One asked for the ability to recognize Uighurs based on identification photos at better than 97 percent accuracy. 

In the central megacity of Chongqing and the region of Tibet, the police put out tenders for similar software. 

And a procurement document for Hebei Province described how the police should be notified when multiple Uighurs booked the same flight on the same day.
A study in 2018 by the authorities described a use for other types of databases. 

Co-written by a Shanghai police official, the paper said facial recognition systems installed near schools could screen for people included in databases of the mentally ill or crime suspects.
One database generated by Yitu software and reviewed by The Times showed how the police in the city of Sanmenxia used software running on cameras to attempt to identify residents more than 500,000 times over about a month beginning in mid-February.
Included in the code alongside tags like “rec_gender” and “rec_sunglasses” was “rec_uygur,” which returned a 1 if the software believed it had found a Uighur. 

Within the half million identifications the cameras attempted to record, the software guessed it saw Uighurs 2,834 times. 

Images stored alongside the entry would allow the police to double check.
Yitu and its rivals have ambitions to expand overseas. 

Such a push could easily put ethnic profiling software in the hands of other governments, said Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy,” Mr. Frankle said. “Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”

An undercover police officer in Kashgar.