Rogue Nation

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.

Wicked Xi and the Traitorous Apple

Apple backs China’s vision of an Orwellian Internet as censorship reaches new heights
By Simon Denyer

BEIJING — Reading headlines from the World Internet Conference in China, the casual reader might have come away a little confused. 

China was opening its doors to the global Internet, some media outlets optimistically declared, while others said Beijing was defending its system of censorship and state control.
And perhaps most confusing of all, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook stood up and celebrated China’s vision of an "open" Internet.
Say what?
China has more than 730 million Internet users, boast the largest e-commerce market in the world, and consumers who enthusiastically embrace mobile digital technology. 

But it censors foreign news websites and keeps Western social media companies out.
The World Internet Conference held in the eastern Chinese city of Wuzhen is meant to promote China’s vision of “cyber-sovereignty’ — the idea that governments all over the world should have the right to control what appears on the Internet in their countries.
In practice, in China, that amounts to the largest system of censorship and digital surveillance in the world, where criticism of the Communist Party is forbidden and lands you in jail.
But that wasn’t mentioned when Cook delivered a keynote speech on the opening day of the gathering Sunday.
“The theme of this conference — developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits — is a vision we at Apple share,” Cook said, in widely reported remarks.

“We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.”
Chinese media welcomed Cook’s endorsement, with the nationalist Global Times declaring in a headline that “Consensus grows at Internet conference.”
Alongside Cook in endorsing China’s digital vision were officials from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Serbia, it noted.

Free speech and human rights advocates were less impressed.
“Cook’s appearance lends credibility to a state that aggressively censors the internet, throws people in jail for being critical about social ills, and is building artificial intelligence systems that monitors everyone and targets dissent,” Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong wrote in an email.
“The version of cyberspace the Chinese government is building is a decidedly dystopian one, and I don’t think anyone would want to share in this ‘common future.’ Apple should have spoken out against it, not endorsed it.”
And it wasn’t just Cook who some critics accused of indulging in a double-speak.
Xi Jinping opened the conference written remarks that led to a flurry of arguably misleading headlines.
“The development of China’s cyberspace is entering a fast lane,” he said, in remarks read out by an official. 

“China's doors will only become more and more open.”
Yet the audience was soon reminded that nothing that could possibly threaten the Communist Party would be allowed through those supposedly open doors.
China has tightened censorship and controls of cyberspace under Xi, with a new cybersecurity law requiring foreign firms to store data locally and submit to domestic surveillance.
Wang Huning, who serves as a member of the Communist Party’s elite standing committee and is Xi’s top ideologue, defended China’s system and even suggested that more controls could be in the offing.
“China stands ready to develop new rules and systems of internet governance to serve all parties and counteract current imbalances,” he said to the conference, according to Reuters.
But it was Cook’s words that prompted the strongest reaction, coming after Apple has also come under fire for its actions in China.
In a written response to questions from Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Ted Cruz of (R-Texas) last month, Apple said that it had removed 674 VPN apps from its app store in China this year — tools that allow users to circumvent censorship by routing traffic abroad — to comply with local laws. 

Skype was also removed from Apple’s China store, the New York Times reported.
In August, Cook said Apple hadn’t wanted to remove the apps, but had to follow local laws wherever it does business.
But Greatfire.org, a group that combats Chinese censorship, argued Apple’s decision to agree to censorship put pressure on other companies to follow suit, and could even mean that Chinese citizens could ultimately be subjected to Chinese censorship when they travel abroad.
“It is undeniable that Tim Cook and Xi Jinping have a shared vision of the internet. Xi wants to be able to control all information and silence those who may threaten his leadership. Cook helps him with vast, unaccountable, implementation of censorship across Apple products,” it wrote to The Washington Post.
Critics saw simple business calculations in Cook’s appearance in Wuzhen.
“Cook Kisses the Ring,’ Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan wrote, arguing that Cook was “desperate to hold onto any remaining scraps of the China market” in the face of stiff competition from local rivals.
The head honchos of China’s main digital and Internet companies, Huawei, Baidu and Tencent, “ought to have been grinning like Cheshire cats,” Culpan added, since censorship has kept foreign companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter out of China and served as a “handy little tool of trade protectionism.”
Nor did it matter if Cook’s tongue was in his cheek, for his presence at the conference, along with Google’s Sundar Pichai and CISCO Systems’ Chuck Robbins, not only gave legitimacy to the authorities but also sent a signal to domestic Chinese rivals that their turf is safe, Culpan wrote.
Rights group Freedom House last month branded China the worst abuser of Internet freedom among 65 countries surveyed, followed by Syria and Ethiopia.
But in Wuzhen, that report was not about to be discussed.

China’s World Internet Conference is still a sham, and Facebook is still playing ball

It’s a propaganda event designed to give international legitimacy to China’s internet censorship regime.

By C. Custer

It’s that time of year again. 

Just like last year, China is kicking off its World Internet Conference in Wuzhen just as Freedom House announces that it is ranked dead last in internet freedom. 

And just like last year, foreign internet companies are playing ball anyway.
2015’s World Internet Conference was a complete sham. 

Attendees were given uncensored internet access so that they didn’t have to actually experience what China means when it talks about “internet sovereignty.” 

There was little in the way of free discussion, and when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales did make an off-message comment suggesting that governments couldn’t totally control the flow of information, his statement was edited to echo the Chinese Party line on the official conference site. Several Western media outlets were also denied credentials to cover the event.
If it wasn’t clear already, last year made it patently clear that what China is holding in Wuzhen is not a conference. 

It is a propaganda event that’s designed to give international legitimacy to China’s internet censorship regime.
You would think all that would have been enough to convince foreign internet companies to stay away this year, but you’d be wrong. 

The guest list may have lost a little luster, but several major internet companies are still there. LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman is there (he’s passionately opposed to Donald Trump, but apparently fine with Chinese authoritarianism). 

Facebook VP Vaughan Smith is there. 

Amazon senior VP Jay Carney is there. 

GSMA CEO John Hoffman is there.
Gentlemen: please stop. 

I understand that you want to engage with China, and you should. 

But this sham conference is not the forum for that. 

It is not an avenue for real discussion. 

It is political theater, a propaganda play that you lend legitimacy simply by attending.
A real world conference is an exchange of ideas, but many ideas about the internet are off limits in Wuzhen. 

This year’s conference doesn’t include any discussion of free speech issues (there’s a shocker). 

And at forums dedicated to more sensitive topics like internet law, many of the speakers are Chinese nationals with official government positions. 

This is not a “world” internet conference, and on sensitive topics it’s pretty clear that the conference organizers (various Chinese government agencies) have no intention of providing a true sampling of world perspectives.
Of course, I’m just basing that on the agenda. 

Perhaps this year’s conference will be a truly open discussion. 

Perhaps pigs will fly (hey, stranger things have happened). 

But I wouldn’t count on it. 

And if the goal is openness, things certainly don’t seem to be off to a great start: