Inside China’s Big Tech Conference, New Ways to Track Citizens
By PAUL MOZUR
Xi Jinping shown on a screen during the fourth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen.
WUZHEN, China — An artificial intelligence company touted a robot that could help doctors with diagnoses.
A start-up displayed a drone designed to carry a single passenger 60 miles per hour.
And in a demonstration worthy of both wonder and worry, a Chinese facial recognition company showed how its technology could quickly identify and describe people.
If there were any doubts about China’s technological prowess, the presentations made this week at the country’s largest tech conference should put them to rest.
The event, once a setting for local tech executives and leaders of impoverished states, this year attracted top American executives like Tim Cook of Apple and Sundar Pichai of Google, as well as executives of Chinese giants like Jack Ma of Alibaba and Pony Ma of Tencent.
Yet all the advancements exhibited at the event, the World Internet Conference, in the picturesque eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen, also offered reason for caution.
The technology enabling a full techno-police state was on hand, giving a glimpse into how new advances in things like artificial intelligence and facial recognition can be used to track citizens — and how they have become widely accepted here. U.S. tech Quisling Tim Cook at the World Internet Conference on Sunday.
The tracking was apparent both in the design of the event, which ended on Tuesday, and in the technology on display.
Tight security checkpoints made use of facial recognition.
Chinese armed police patrolled.
And in the dark corners of the whitewashed walls of the convention hall, the red lights of closed-circuit cameras glowed.
A fast-growing facial recognition company, Face++, turned its technology on conferencegoers.
On a large screen in its booth, the software identified their gender, described their hair length and color and characterized the clothes they wore.
Other Chinese companies showed what could be done with such data.
A state-run telecom company, China Unicom, featured a display with graphics breaking down the huge amounts of data the company has on its subscribers.
One map broke down the population of Beijing based on the changing layout of the city’s population as people commuted to and from work.
Another showed where foreign visitors roamed on its network. Xiao Qiao robots at the conference.
The people overseeing China Unicom’s booth openly discussed the data, a sign of how widely accepted such surveillance and data collection have become in China.
At Unicom’s two other state-run rivals, a similar penchant for measurements and surveillance was also on display.
China Mobile floated a camera on the prow of one of the many boats that drift through Wuzhen’s canals, sending the images over its latest and faster cellular technology.
China Telecom showed off its ability to measure the amount of trash in several garbage cans and detect malfunctioning fire hydrants.
Investors and analysts say China’s unabashed fervor for collecting such data, combined with its huge population, could eventually give its artificial intelligence companies an edge over American ones. If Silicon Valley is marked by a libertarian streak, China’s vision offers something of an antithesis, one where tech is meant to reinforce and be guided by the steady hand of the state.
Such developments underscore a nascent back-and-forth between China and the United States that will determine much about technology’s future development and application. The Ehang 184, an oversized flying drone meant to ferry a single passenger at 60 miles per hour, on display at the conference.
Speaking at a panel on terrorism, Mei Jianming, described as a chief expert on antiterrorism for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an intergovernmental group that includes China and Russia among other countries, labeled groups that speak out for the human rights of China’s Islamic minority Uighurs as terrorists.
He then said Beijing should do more to use its influence to push Twitter to change its terms of service and push back against such groups.
“We should strengthen the capability of our propaganda,” he said.
“On the Chinese official side, our China Daily and Xinhua News have their own Twitter presence, but the effectiveness of their propaganda is not enough. It’s clearly not enough.” The contradictions of using sites like Twitter to change opinions abroad, while blocking them domestically, were often evident but almost as often unremarked upon.
During the opening speech made by Wang Huning, a member of China’s leading seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, there were more overtures to openness and cooperation than to the security and censorship that have marked China’s approach to the internet.
One of the most clear discussions of censorship came not from a speaker at the conference, but from an official watching the conference’s entry gate on the first day.
A representative of the Wenzhou city government, he queried journalists about how they got around China’s internet filters.
It was not clear whether he was genuinely curious, or wanted to find out which tools were most effective so they could be later targeted.
Facebook blocked dissident Guo Wengui after the Chinese government complained
By Heather Timmons
Facebook, Twitter, and Google were grilled this morning about their efforts to combat propaganda in the run up the 2016 US election by the Senate’s intelligence committee.
Most of the questions focused, naturally, on Russia’s influence, because the Kremlin was specifically identified by US intelligence as trying to sway the vote. Florida senator Marco Rubio, who takes a particular interest in Beijing’s attempts to curtail Chinese citizens’ free speech, focused for a moment on dissident Guo Wengui.
Facebook said Oct. 1 it had taken down a page associated with Guo and stopped him from posting to his own account after he had posted someone else’s “personal identifier information.” Did Facebook do so at the behest of Beijing, Rubio asked the company’s attorney Colin Stretch. Kind of, Stretch admitted. “We did receive a report from a representative of the Chinese government about that account,” Stretch said.
“We analyzed that report as we would any other, and took action based on our policies,” he said.
Guo Wengui
The Chinese government has been trying to silence Guo, and to bring him back from the US to China, because he has been using social media to disseminate claims that elite government officials are corrupt.
The wealthy businessman lives in a Manhattan penthouse surround by bodyguards. Guo’s account was blocked because he published information about Wang Qishan, a member of the elite Politburo in charge of Beijing’s anti-corruption push, and Fan Bingbing, a movie star on his Facebook page, people briefed on his case say.
He has alleged that Wang’s family amassed a fortune from dealings with Chinese conglomerate HNA, and that Fan was his mistress. The company’s Community Standards only specify it will take action for “credible threats to public figures and hate speech directed at them.”
A Facebook spokesman said when his account was blocked that “we don’t allow people to publish the personal information of others without their consent” and the company had no update today after the hearing. Although Facebook is officially blocked in China, the Chinese government has a robust presence on the platform, mostly through state-owned media accounts, which claim to have tens of millions of Facebook fans.
The Chinese government employs a veritable army of paid social media users to spread its message on Chinese networks that are jokingly called the “50 Cent party”. The 50 Cent party is also colonizing foreign social media.
Searching for Guo’s name on Twitter turns up a string of poorly-worded tweets disparaging him.
While these moves can be rationalized from most business perspectives, acquiescing to China’s digitally authoritarian policies for market access will have harrowing political consequences in the long term. Apple and Facebook, two of the most powerful companies in the world, have set dangerous precedents in these decisions that risk being followed both in and outside of the tech industry.
When big tech bends its principles to limbo into Chinese markets, it encourages other Western companies and institutions to do so as well. The latest example is Cambridge University Press.
The prominent publishing house recently removed hundreds of academic articles from the website of its publications China Quarterly and the Journal of Asian Studies, in response to Chinese authorities deeming them controversial.
After outcry from academics and researchers, Cambridge University Press reversed its decision – but the fact remains that they were willing to censor peer-reviewed academic research. At best, such decisions risk entrenching the status quo – China has already ranked as the lowest in the world in Internet freedom for two years running.
The possibilities that would exist – such as automated mining of publicly and privately available data coupled with mass sentiment analysis to predict and quell dissent in advance – have horrifying implications for human rights.
Repressive governance could, to a large extent, become an automated affair. China has already implemented a frightening citizenship score pilot program, which gives each citizen a “social credit score”.
The possibility of AI autocracy in the People’s Republic is real, and it is one that Western tech companies are tacitly endorsing when they choose to forfeit digital rights in favor of market access. It would also be naïve to assume this form AI autocracy will stay put in the Middle Kingdom. Authoritarians have a way of sharing repressive technology – which is why one of Egypt’s biggest telecoms companies, Orascom, owns 75% of North Korea’s only official mobile network, Koryolink. It is also why China’s cellphone company Huawei helped Iranian security forces to stifle dissent at home. Two-thirds of all internet users worldwide live in countries where criticism of the authorities is subject to censorship.
It would be reasonable, with this in mind, to assume that China’s AI authoritarian model—if successful—could become the soft-power the country has lacked on the world stage up to now. The Economist rightfully pointed out in July: “Western companies are at least engaged in an open debate about the ethical implications of AI; and intelligence agencies are constrained by democratic institutions. Neither is true of China. [..] If China ends up having most influence over its future, then the state, not citizens, may be the biggest beneficiary”.
In an era where the leader of the free world is emboldening authoritarians on everything from reneging on human rights to slanderously impugning the press, the onus falls on civil society and the private sector to maintain and promote liberal democratic values at home and abroad.
Western tech companies are one of the most powerful actors in the latter sphere, and also fund many in the former.
This puts them in a unique position to promote privacy, security and digital rights around the world. The social and political consequences of technology are externalities that must be accounted for.
It is impossible to decouple business decisions in the tech community from responsibility for the consequences that result from them, especially as technology continues to play an ever more crucial role in individuals’ daily lives.
Cambridge University stood up to China in a way companies like Apple haven't By Cheang Ming With its decision to reinstate hundreds of academic articles, a division of Cambridge University has done what larger entities have failed to: stand up to China. Cambridge University Press, the world's oldest publishing house, on Monday reversed an earlier decision to block access within China to 315 articles in the China Quarterly, a leading academic journal focusing on contemporary China.
Most articles that had been blocked focused on topics seen as inconvenient to the Chinese government, including the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square protests and Taiwan. People stand outside the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on August 23, 2017.
The publisher had blocked those articles from being accessed on the mainland after receiving an "instruction" to do so from a Chinese agency, CUP said in an Aug. 18 statement. While China has blocked other media platforms — such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal — in the past, the move to censor CUP was different due to the academic journal's smaller, niche readership. Anita Chan, an Australian National University senior fellow, told CNBC the move was "unprecedented."
Two articles authored by Chan were among those blocked. Meanwhile, a petition started by Peking University Associate Professor Christopher Balding stated that the academic community was "disturbed" by the Chinese government's attempt to "export its censorship on topics that do not fit its preferred narrative." Public outcry from academics and activists eventually led to the articles being reinstated by CUP on Aug. 21. Even though it took several days of heated protests for the Cambridge unit to change its mind, the publisher's ultimate decision highlights moves taken in the opposite direction by multinational corporations to placate regulators on the mainland.
VPNs allow individuals in China a way of bypassing its "Great Firewall," a system that restricts access to the internet. In December last year, Apple pulled a similar move when it removed the New York Times' app from its Chinese app store. Reuters also reported last month that the iPhone maker announced it was building its first data center in China after the introduction of new cybersecurity laws requiring companies to store sensitive data on servers in China.
The new rules were vague while the practice of storing data on local servers could expose companies to government monitoring.
Apple isn't the only company complying with tougher regulations in China either.
Amazon's Chinese partner told clients it would "shut down" unauthorized VPNs, Reuters reported earlier this month.
Like Apple, an Amazon Web Services spokesman said the company had to work through Chinese partners to adhere to local regulations, Reuters added. In 2014 media reports said LinkedIn (now a subsidiary of Microsoft) was censoring posts of a sensitive nature from being seen in China so it could operate in the mainland market. Even though well-known companies — such as Apple and Google — make headlines when they either accept or reject regulator demands, the decision-making process is more "nuanced and mundane" for most firms, said Christopher Beddor, an associate at consultancy Eurasia Group. "For those companies that are impacted by censorship regulations, there's often a behind-the-scenes back-and-forth discussion with local partners and regulators over how to adapt the content for the Chinese market," Beddor added. That discussion happens, in part, because companies are trying to make money in China — as their shareholders likely desire — whereas CUP has more leeway as a university department. What's next Chinese authorities reacted to CUP's reversal just hours after its announcement: Regulators promptly scrubbed a Weibo post from the Cambridge University account announcing the decision, according to a report from the Guardian on Tuesday. However, the academic publisher's website remained available in China. Greatfire.org, a website monitoring censorship in the country, found that the webpage for "The China Quarterly" was uncensored as of Aug. 24.
As the CUP website used Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the only way for authorities to block individual pages would be to block the entire website, Greatfire.org co-founder Martin Johnson (a pseudonym) told CNBC. The CUP website was also likely to remain unblocked, Charlie Smith, a pseudonym used by another Greatfire.org co-founder, told CNBC in an email.
He said that's because the financial cost required to access journal articles acted as "its own form of censorship." An aerial view of King's College, University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the university.
"I think that CUP probably overreacted to some request from an official," Smith added. Some China watchers have linked the tightening in regulations to the upcoming 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in the fall as bureaucrats attempt to step up their game ahead of an anticipated leadership reshuffle.
However, the new level of scrutiny is unlikely to subside after the event, experts said. "The fundamental trend remains toward more state control over media and information," Beddor told CNBC. Although the pace at which new regulations are initiated could slow after the party congress, it was unlikely that rules would be reversed following the event's conclusion, he added. Even though Apple's Cook was hopeful that engaging with the authorities would lead to fewer restrictions in the future, not everyone was equally optimistic. "Censorship in China is a long-term vision and is not really a tap that get(s) turned on and off. It's not like sites get unblocked after the congress finishes. They stay blocked. Which is part of Xi Jinping's grand plan," said Smith. Meanwhile, some experts have voiced fears that China's censorship regime may even extend beyond its borders. University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady, who had one article in the China Quarterly blocked in the mainland, said, "China under Xi is now not only trying to control the information environment in China, but also the external information environment when it pertains to China."
Apple’s troubles in China have just started after it removed more than 400 VPN apps
By Ben Lovejoy Apple has come under considerable criticism following its decision to agree to a Chinese government request to remove VPN apps from its local App Store.
Virtual private networks allow people in China to access sites blocked by the government, and to ensure that authorities cannot track the sites they visit. App-tracking site ASO100.com says that the company has so far removed more than 400 VPN apps.
But while Apple is trying to maintain good relationships with China by complying with such requests, analysts and tech commentators believe that its troubles with the country ‘have just started’ … It’s not the first time that Apple has come hard up against the Chinese government where apps and other content are concerned.
A government agency shut down the iTunes Movies Store and iBooks Store in China last year, and this year demanded that Apple remove the New York Times app. The WSJ reports that such conflicts are only likely to increase as its services revenue grows and the Chinese government starts looking at it less as a hardware manufacturer and more as a content provider. “Apple’s success globally had come from its close integration between hardware and software. Increasingly, that software means content,” says Duncan Clark, a tech consultant and longtime China watcher.
“This has posed a challenge for the Chinese government.” That is also why, a former senior executive at a U.S. tech company told me, “Apple’s troubles have just started.” Apple is increasingly being placed in a no-win situation, obliged to cooperate with the Chinese government to avoid its operations there being closed down, but taking a PR hit from those both within and outside the country who believe it should demonstrate the kind of backbone it did with the FBI in the USA. “So, they are willing to face off against the FBI to defend encryption, but bow to China against VPNs?” asked one Reddit user. “If Apple doesn’t stand up and make some noise, which company can?” asks Tao Jingzhou, a lawyer at Dechert LLP in Beijing. Google famously took a stand in 2010, when it decided to exit the Chinese market rather than give in to censorship, but that was an easier decision, argues the paper. Google’s China operation was unprofitable then, in contrast to Apple’s China success.
Chinese consumers and companies benefit from Apple’s presence in the country. Questioned about it during the recent earnings call, Tim Cook said that the company removed the VPN apps reluctantly, but has to comply with local laws.
We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries, we follow the law wherever we do business.
We strongly believe in participating in markets and bringing benefits to customers.
We’re hopeful that over time the restrictions we are seeing are loosened.
How Qualcomm Is Backing China’s Tech Ambitions
By DAVID BARBOZA As the Chinese government develops drones, the American technology giant Qualcomm is helping. The same goes for artificial intelligence, mobile technology and supercomputers.
Qualcomm is also working to help Chinese companies like Huawei break into overseas markets in support of China’s “go global” campaign to develop big multinational brands. Qualcomm is providing money, expertise and engineering for Beijing’s master plan to create its own technology superpowers.
Big American companies fiercely protect their intellectual property and trade secrets, fearful of giving an edge to rivals.
But they have little choice in China — and Washington is looking on with alarm. To gain access to the Chinese market, American companies are being forced to transfer technology, create joint ventures, lower prices and aid homegrown players.
Those efforts form the backbone of Xi Jinping’s ambitious plan to ensure that China’s companies, military and government dominate core areas of technology like artificial intelligence and semiconductors.
As concerns mount about Beijing’s industrial policy, the Trump administration is preparing a broad investigation into potential violations of American intellectual property, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Congress is also considering ways to restrict China’s ability to acquire advanced technology by toughening rules to prevent the purchase of American assets and limit technology transfers.
In this arena, America’s economic interests are aligned with its national security needs.
The worry is that by teaming up with China, American companies could be sowing the seeds of their own destruction, as well as handing over critical technology that the United States relies on for its military, space and defense programs. Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are working with Chinese companies to develop server chips, creating rivals to their own product.
Intel is working with the Chinese to build high-end mobile chips, in competition with Qualcomm. IBM has agreed to transfer valuable technology that could enable China to break into the lucrative mainframe banking business.
“There’s a great deal of unease in Washington,” said James Lewis, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
“The defense, intelligence agencies and others are concerned that advanced chip-making capabilities are going to China.”
Qualcomm declined to comment, as did Intel.
Qualcomm is caught in the middle.
The world’s dominant mobile phone chip maker, Qualcomm ran afoul of the Chinese government, getting hit in 2015 with a record $975 million fine for anticompetitive behavior.
To get back in Beijing’s good graces, the company agreed to lower its prices in China, promised to shift more of its high-end manufacturing to partners in China, and pledged to upgrade the country’s technology capabilities.
The extent of Qualcomm’s involvement with the Chinese government — and the complications for American tech giants — is seen in a low-slung office building in the southwest part of the country. There, a team of engineers is developing leading-edge microchips to compete with the finest made by Intel.
The chips will help power a huge data and cloud center with the potential to strengthen the country’s computing capabilities.
No longer content to rely on buying the chips that go into cellphones, computers and cars, China now wants to design and build the brains that drive much of the digital world.
The government is providing land and financing to the start-up formed with Qualcomm, called Huaxintong Semiconductor.
Qualcomm has provided the technology and about $140 million in initial funding.
“Qualcomm has a balancing act,” said Willy Shih, who teaches at Harvard Business School.
“Most of the world’s PCs are made in China, and most of the world’s smartphones too, so they have to play along. It’s a fact of life.”
Qualcomm was early to break into China.
In the mid-1990s, as China’s economy began to boom, Bill Clinton pressed the country’s leaders to open to American technology companies.
Members of the Clinton administration, including Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative, and William M. Daley, the secretary of commerce, were dispatched to Beijing to hammer out the details.
They pushed for one company by name: Qualcomm.
“At the time, they were the only U.S. show in town,” Ms. Barshefsky said.
“Bill Daley and I pushed the Chinese hard on accepting the U.S. standard for wireless technology,” she added, “and that was Qualcomm.”
Mobile phone adoption was taking off globally, largely backed by a European wireless standard called G.S.M., or global system for mobile communications.
Qualcomm had a competing American standard called C.D.M.A., or Code Division Multiple Access. Irwin M. Jacobs, a founder of Qualcomm, spearheaded an aggressive lobbying campaign in Washington and Beijing, promoting the technology’s potential to transform wireless communication markets.
“We knew China would be important, and they didn’t have their own system,” said Perry LaForge, a former Qualcomm executive.
“We also told them this system would give them an opportunity to manufacture their own handsets, and not rely on buying them from other countries.”
When Qualcomm first entered China in the late 1990s, it was slow to gain traction.
The company struggled to find Chinese partners to produce mobile phones that worked with its network.
China also tried to develop its own wireless standard.
Qualcomm eventually won out, helping write the standards for next-generation mobile technology, 3G and 4G service.
The standard championed by European telecom providers faded rapidly.
And China’s homegrown technology struggled.
By 2013, virtually every wireless device around the world was reliant on either Qualcomm’s chips or its patents — enough to provide some of the technology industry’s fattest profit margins.
With its dominance rising, global brands like Apple and Samsung began complaining to regulators around the world, citing “discriminatory” pricing practices and high royalty fees.
In China, a trade group made up of the country’s major handset makers complained about patent holders levying “exorbitant licensing fees.”
“These days a smartphone is covered by about 250,000 patents,” said Dieter Ernst, a senior fellow at the East-West Center, a research and educational center based in Honolulu.
“A Chinese smartphone maker needs to negotiate license agreements with companies like Qualcomm that own the essential patents.”
“The Chinese government was worried about this,” he added.
“That all these costs could constrain Chinese companies.”
The raids began at dawn, in late November 2013.
Investigators descended upon Qualcomm’s offices in Beijing and Shanghai, questioning the staff and hauling away laptops and documents.
At the time of the raids, the San Diego-based company’s senior managers were at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York, attending an investor conference.
The executives were planning to talk about the company’s strategy.
Instead, they began fielding frantic phone calls from China.
The China business, which accounted for more than half of its global revenue, was in trouble.
A week later, one of the country’s most powerful regulatory agencies, the National Development and Reform Commission (N.D.R.C.), announced that it was looking into whether Qualcomm had abused its power in the sale of mobile phone chips.
“Qualcomm came to control so much of the chip market in China,” said Louie Ming, a former Qualcomm executive in China.
“It was clear they were eventually going to run into antitrust problems.”
While Qualcomm agreed to fully cooperate with the investigation, some senior executives appealed to the Obama administration, pressing the White House to raise the issue with China’s senior leaders, according to a former administration official.
Qualcomm’s troubles went beyond China.
The company was also under scrutiny by antitrust regulators in the European Union and South Korea, as well as by the United States Federal Trade Commission.
China didn’t back down.
The head of the N.D.R.C. branded Qualcomm a monopoly.
In February 2015, after a 15-month-long investigation, Qualcomm settled allegations in China that it had charged unfairly high prices for its chips and patents.
The company agreed to pay the $975 million fine — about 8 percent of its annual revenue in China — and to lower the prices for chips sold in the country.
“We are pleased that the resolution has removed the uncertainty surrounding our business in China, and we will now focus our full attention and resources on supporting our customers and partners in China,” said Steve Mollenkopf, the company’s chief executive, said at the time. Qualcomm then went into business with the Chinese government. There was a $150 million investment fund to help Chinese start-ups; new research and design facilities set up with Chinese companies such as Huawei and Tencent; and a partnership with a Beijing-based company called Thundersoft to develop drones, virtual reality goggles and internet-connected devices. Qualcomm is also helping the Chinese government develop supercomputers, a technology the United States government has discouraged American companies from supporting overseas.
In May, Qualcomm agreed to form a joint venture with other state-backed firms to design and sell mass-market smartphone chips.
And to help make Chinese chip manufacturing more competitive, Qualcomm has pledged to shift more of its high-end production — long done by outside contractors in Taiwan and South Korea — to China.Continue reading the main story
Beijing is pressing American technology giants to form joint ventures or partnerships with Chinese companies and transfer advanced technology. The enterprises, in which American companies usually take a minority stake, are backed by the government.
Company
Partner
Date
Product
Investment
AMD
Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Company
2016
Server chips
$293 million
Qualcomm
Guizhou government
2016
High-end server chips
$280 million
Brocade
Guizhou government
2016
Data center networking solutions
unknown
VMWare
Sugon Information
2016
Cloud computing and virtualization software
$50 million
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Tsinghua Holdings Unisplendour Group
2016
Networking servers and storage systems
$4.5 billion
Microsoft
C.E.T.C. Group
2015
Software
$40 million
Western Digital
Tsinghua Holdings Unisplendour Group
2016
Data center storage systems
$300 million
Cisco Systems
Inspur Group
2016
Networking systems
$100 million
Intel
Spreadtrum/ RDA Microelectronics
2014
Mobile phone chips
$1.5 billion
The investment figure is either the initial investment in the venture or the U.S. company's investment in it. | By THE NEW YORK TIMES
“This is what China does better than anyone else,” said Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank focused on technology policy that has conducted studies detailing the Chinese government’s pressure on technology companies.
“They have a large carrot and a large stick,” he said.
“And they have a market no C.E.O. can walk away from.”
Qualcomm’s biggest new venture is taking shape in southwest China’s Guizhou Province. Determined to leap into advanced technology, China has designated a large parcel of land in the provincial capital of Guiyang as the home of a new industrial park for supercomputing, data centers and cloud computing.
The country’s large state-run telecom operators and its internet behemoths, including Alibaba and Tencent, are moving in, to build massive server farms.
The region offers lower energy costs and abundant supplies of water, necessary to cool server farms.
A year ago, Qualcomm set up a joint venture with the Guizhou government and pledged to invest about $140 million for a minority stake in the business, situated in a development zone that has also attracted the interest of Microsoft and Dell.
Qualcomm says it received American government approval for the deal.
The new Qualcomm joint venture, Huaxintong Semiconductor, broke ground on the site in 2016, and now operates in a 46,000-square-foot design and engineering center.
A major test of the partnership will come when the joint venture’s first server chips are released — helping Qualcomm and the Chinese government stake out new ground.
The Chinese government will control the chips and reap most of the profits.
In late March, Qualcomm’s president, Derek K. Aberle, flew to Guizhou to meet a powerful local government leader, Chen Min'er, a confidant of the Chinese president.
Seated in a government hall, before an enormous landscape painting, Mr. Aberle pledged to “continually cooperate” with the Chinese government.
