Chinazism: Why you should worry if you have a Chinese smartphone

China’s use of technology for social control of its citizens is extensive – but it affects users elsewhere too

By Ian Tucker
Chinese firms have signed deals with cities around the globe that include facial recognition software. 

Samantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s Data-Driven Power Expansion.

Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world’s knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes… that’s not really happened has it?
Bill Clinton said that, for China, controlling free speech online would be like “nailing Jell-O to the wall”. 

I wish he had been right. 

But unfortunately, there was too much focus on the great firewall of China and not enough on how the Chinese Communist party was trying to shape its external environment.

When did China pivot from seeing the internet as a US-generated threat to something it could use to discipline and punish its own population?
It’s not just the internet, it’s technology in general. 

If you go back to even the late 1970s and early 80s, the way the Chinese Communist party (CCP) talks about technology is as a tool of social management. 

It’s a way of not only coercive control, but also sort of cooperative control where you participate in your own management. 

It’s this idea of shaping the environment, shaping how people think, how they’re willing to act before they even know they’re making a choice. 

That’s the party’s idea.

When did that develop into what is called the social credit system?
Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin spoke about this in 2000. 

He said we need a social credit system to merge rule by law and rule by virtue. 

I don’t see it as different from the way Hannah Arendt describes how regimes attempt to make the law inseparable from ethics in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

How does the social credit system work for the average citizen? As they are going about their lives, are they continually earning and losing points based on their behaviour?
A pop cultural reference might be the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. 

But it isn’t the same. 

It’s not really a number score that goes up and down. 

There are multiple inputs. 

So you have, say, legal inputs, like a court record, and financial inputs. 

Then there are third-party inputs, such as surveillance video or data about your sentiment on social media. 

The system includes blacklists, records on public websites, and platforms to support decisions on creditworthiness that integrate things like “sentiment analysis”. 

This applies to companies and individuals. 

Muji’s Shanghai branch had a mark of dishonesty on its credit record with the Shanghai government because one of its products was labelled “Made in Taiwan”.

The number of people affected is enormous: 17.5 million people were prevented from buying flights in 2018. Is there much pushback from the Chinese population about this system?
An average person might not see how it’s affecting them yet. 

Social credit is technology augmenting existing control methods. 

So if you’re used to that system, you aren’t necessarily seeing the change yet. 

Blacklists aren’t new, but the technology supporting this social management is. 

And over time, as it becomes more effective, that’s where more people will notice the impact.

So there isn’t much concept of user privacy or anonymising data in China?
Privacy matters to the average Chinese citizen and there are privacy regulations in place. 

But privacy stops where the party’s power begins. 

And so, you know, the party state might put controls on how companies can share data. 

But again privacy stops where the party’s power begins. 

And that’s a huge difference in the system.
One thing that’s interesting to keep in mind is the system itself. 

When we think about China’s authoritarianism, we think about surveillance cameras, we think about facial recognition. 

But we forget that a lot of the technology involved provides convenience. 

And control happens for convenience. 

Some of the technologies involved in increasing the party’s power are actually providing services – maybe Mussolini and his timely trains is a useful way of thinking about it.
Dr Samantha Hoffman, an expert on China’s cyber security operations.

The most egregious example of this surveillance technology would be in East Turkestan for controlling the Uighur [Muslim] population?
The most visibly coercive forms of what the party is doing are unfolding in East Turkestan. 

It’s a virtual police state. 

There are QR codes on people’s doors for when the party goes in to check on who is in. 

Some researchers have found that if someone leaves through the back door instead of the front door, that can be considered suspicious behaviour.

Is the wider Chinese population aware of how the technology is being used in East Turkestan? Do they realise this is a more enhanced version of what we’ve got in their own lives?
I don’t think people are aware of how bad it is. 

A lot of people don’t believe Western reporting. 

If they see it. 

Even if they do believe it, propaganda has shaped a bad public opinion of the Uighurs.

Do you think the Chinese Communist party has a file on you?
I imagine that they probably have a file on a lot of outspoken researchers. 

I try not to think about what mine would look like. 

In general, a lot of researchers on China have a fear, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, about losing access or the ability to go to China.

You have written about your fears that a commercial deal struck between Huawei and a Turkish mobile operator could be used to monitor the exiled Uighur population in Turkey.
Chinese tech giants like Huawei are signing agreements for smart cities globally – in April we at Aspi counted 75. 

These agreements include public security, licence-plate and facial recognition tools. 

As a local government you’re taking what is the cheapest and best product for your city. 

You’re deploying it in ways you’ve decided are reasonable, but what might be forgotten is that these services require data to be sent back to the company to keep it up to date – and who else has access to that data once the manufacturer has it? 

One agreement was made with Turkish mobile provider Turkcell. 

Turkey has about 10,000 Uighurs living in exile – that system could be used to further control and harass exiles and family members in China.
More generally, I found that the party central propaganda department has made cooperation agreements with a number of major Chinese tech companies. 

As their products are bedded in they become ways of collecting tons of data. 

A language translation tool, for instance, doesn’t sound like a surveillance tool but it’s a way to collect a lot of data. 

Technically it’s not different from what Google does but their intent is different – it’s about state security.

So western governments should be wary of installing Chinese-designed tech infrastructure in their cities?
Yes. 

It’s perhaps uncomfortable for a lot of people to acknowledge, but the party is very clear about its intent. 

Its intent relates to state security. 

The party talks about “discourse power” – the party’s version of the truth being the only thing that’s accepted. 

The Chinese government ultimately controls all Chinese companies through its security legislation. You might be comfortable with someone collecting data to tailor advertising to you, but are you comfortable with sharing your data with a regime that has 1.5 million Uighurs imprisoned on the basis of their ethnic identity?

So we should be cautious about buying Chinese smartphones and smart home products?
I would be. 

You may think “I’m not researching the CCP or testifying in Congress, so I don’t have anything to worry about”. 

But you don’t really know how that data is being collected and potentially used to shape your opinion and shape your decisions, among other things. 

Even understanding advertising and consumer preferences can feed into propaganda. 

Taken together, that can be used to influence an election or feelings about a particular issue.

Some of these elements of monitoring and nudging are present in western life. For instance, fitness tracking that earns you discounts on health insurance, or local authorities using machine learning to identify potential abuse victims. Should we be careful about letting this stuff into society?
We need to be very careful. 

It’s easy to see what the benefits are, but we aren’t adequately defining the risks. 

Some of the problems can be dealt with by introducing more data literacy programmes, so that individuals understand, say, the privacy issues concerning a home-security camera.
The Chinese party state is taking advantage of the weaknesses in liberal democracies, whether they’re legal or cultural. 

They take advantage of our really weak data privacy laws. 

GDPR is a good step, but it doesn’t really deal with the core problem of technology that’s providing a service. 

By its nature the company providing the service collects and uses data. 

Who has access to that data, their ability to process it, and their intent is the problem.

China’s social credit system interferes in other nations’ sovereignty

System, criticised as an Orwellian tool of mass surveillance, is shaping behaviour of foreign businesses, report says
By Kelsey Munro

China’s social credit system, a big-data system for monitoring and shaping business and citizens’ behaviour, is reaching beyond China’s borders to impact foreign companies, according to new research.
The system, which has been compared to an Orwellian tool of mass surveillance, is an ambitious work in progress: a series of big data and AI-enabled processes that effectively grant subjects a social credit score based on their social, political and economic behaviour.
People with low scores can be banned or blacklisted from accessing services including flights and train travel; while those with high scores can access privileges. 

The Chinese government aims to have all 1.35 billion of its citizens subject to the system by 2020.
But a new report by US China scholar Samantha Hoffman for the ASPI International Cyber Policy Institute in Canberra claims the system’s impact beyond China’s borders has not been well understood, and is in fact already shaping the behaviour of foreign businesses in line with Chinese Communist party preferences. 

It has the “potential to interfere directly in the sovereignty of other nations”, she said.
She said recent incidents where Chinese authorities pressured international airlines in the US and Australia to use Beijing’s preferred terminology to refer to Taiwan and Hong Kong were high-profile examples of this new extension of the social credit system rules to foreign companies.
“The civil aviation industry credit management measures that the airlines are accused of violating were written to implement two key policy guidelines on establishing China’s social credit system,” she explains. 

“Social credit was used specifically in these cases to compel international airlines to acknowledge and adopt the CCP’s version of the truth, and so repress alternative perspectives on Taiwan.”
As of 1 January 2018, all companies with a Chinese business licence – a necessity for operating in the country – were brought into the social credit system through the new licence requirement to have an 18-digit “unified social credit code”. 

Through this business ID number, the Chinese government keeps track of all businesses, reporting transgressions on its National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System, Hoffman said. 

The system extends to non-profits, NGOs, trade unions and social organisations after 30 June.
“Companies don’t have a choice but to comply if they want to continue doing business in China,” Hoffman told the Guardian Australia.
Sanctions for companies so far have come in the form of fines, she said, citing the example of the Japanese retailer Muji, which was fined 200,000 yuan in May for labelling on products sold in China that listed Taiwan as a country. 

The fine cited a violation of PRC advertising law banning activity which damages “the dignity or interests of the state”, but the violation was also recorded on the social credit system’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. 

This listing can trigger further fines from other state agencies, Hoffman said.
It is not clear whether foreign companies have access to the information kept on their social credit record, nor if foreign citizens could find out if their nation’s companies have made concessions or changed their behavior as a result.
Guardian Australia unsuccessfully sought comment from Qantas, which announced earlier this month it would change the language used on its global websites in accordance with the Chinese government’s preferred terminology for Taiwan.
Hoffman is a visiting academic fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin. 

Her report, Social Credit: Technology-enhanced Authoritarian Control with Global Consequences, was published on Thursday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a security-focused thinktank which has urged the Australian government take a harder line on Chinese government interference in its democracy.
The report comes amid a difficult period in Australia-China relations; in the same week Australia’s parliamentary committee released a bipartisan report paving the way for the passage of new draft laws against covert, coercive or corrupt foreign interference.

What is the social credit system?
China’s social credit system is an Orwellian tool of social monitoring and political repression.
People can be blacklisted for transgressions such as smoking on trains, using expired tickets or failing to pay fines, as well as spreading false information or causing trouble on flights, according to statements released by China’s National Development and Reform Commission in March.
Citizens with high credit scores can access better hotels, rental homes and even schools; while those with low credit scores can be temporarily or permanently banned from taking planes or trains, as happened to 6.15 million people in 2017, on the government’s own figures. 

A pilot version of the scheme run this year in Hangzhou City reportedly saw citizens with high social credit ratings get free access to gym facilities and shorter public hospital waiting times.
On the business side, the Brookings Institute has reported that businesses that pay tax on time and “abide by government demands” will get better loan conditions and easier access to public tenders; noncompliant businesses will face more difficult business conditions.
But researchers believe its power and reach may be overstated.
Queensland University of Technology researcher Meg Jing Zeng has said that while the social credit system can be used to punish political dissenters such as journalist Liu Hu, it may have positive benefits because government officials can be blacklisted for corrupt behaviour. 

Over 1,100 officials were on restricted lists at December 2017, according to the state media organisation People’s Daily.
An academic study of the social credit system released last month by Belgian researcher Rogier Creemers said that while the Chinese government had high ambitions for the system, at present it remained a relatively crude tool.