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.

Supreme Tech Quisling

Good for China and Google, Bad for America.
Google is sharing a military technology with America's monstrous enemy.
By Peter Thiel
DeepMind drew attention in 2016, when its AlphaGo software beat Lee Sedol, champion of the game Go.

A “Manhattan Project” for artificial intelligence is how Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, described his company in 2010, when I was one of its first investors. 

I took it as figurative grandiosity. 

I should have taken it as a literal warning sign, because that is how it was taken in foreign capitals that were paying close attention.
Now almost a decade later, DeepMind is the crown jewel of Google’s A.I. effort. 

It has been the object of intense fascination in East Asia especially since March 2016 when its AlphaGo software project beat Lee Sedol, a champion of the ancient strategic board game of Go.
Such feats notwithstanding, DeepMind, having now gone on three times longer than the original Manhattan Project, is not clearly any closer to its core goal of creating an “artificial general intelligence” that rivals or replaces humanity. 

But it is finally becoming clear that, as with nuclear fission before it, the first users of the machine learning tools being created today will be generals rather than board game strategists.
A.I. is a military technology. 

Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis. 

Though less uncanny than Frankenstein’s monster, these tools are nevertheless valuable to any army — to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already living amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war.
No doubt machine learning tools have civilian uses, too; A.I. is a good example of a “dual use” technology. 

But that common-sense understanding of A.I.’s ambiguity has been strangely missing from the narrative that pits a monolithic “A.I.” against all of humanity.
A.I.’s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America’s leading software company, Google — starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon — is shocking. 

As President Barack Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, “If you’re working in China, you don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not.”
No intensive investigation is required to confirm this. 

All one need do is glance at the Communist Party of China’s own constitution: Xi Jinping added the principle of “civil-military fusion,” which mandates that all research done in China be shared with the People’s Liberation Army, in 2017.
That same year, Google decided to open an A.I. lab in Beijing. 

According to Fei-Fei Li, the executive who opened it, the lab is “focused on basic A.I. research” because Google is “an A.I.-first company” in a world where “A.I. and its benefits have no borders.” All this is part of a “huge transformation” in “humanity” itself. 

Back in the United States, a rebellion among rank and file employees led Google last June to announce the abandonment of its “Project Maven” A.I. contract with the Pentagon. 

Perhaps the most charitable word for these twin decisions would be to call them naïve.
How can Google use the rhetoric of “borderless” benefits to justify working with the country whose “Great Firewall” has imposed a border on the internet itself? 

This way of thinking works only inside Google’s cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. 

The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called “cosmopolitanism” is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places — and incurious about them.
A little curiosity about China would have gone a long way, since the Communist Party is not shy about declaring its commitment to domination in general and exploitation of technology in particular. 

Of course, any American who pays attention and questions the Communist line is accused by the party of having a “Cold War mentality” — but this very accusation relies on forgetfulness and incuriosity among its intended audience.
Since 1971, the American elite’s Cold War attitude toward China’s leaders has been one of warm indulgence. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, that meant supporting China against a greater adversary, the Soviet Union. What is extremely strange is that this policy of indulgence continued and even deepened after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
A few years after the Cold War ended, American leaders started treating China the way they had treated West Germany and Japan. 

We tolerated punishing trade deficits in the 1970s and 1980s to support those two allies, and we had strategic reasons to do it. 

As for building up China in the 1990s and 2000s, America’s generosity was supposed to somehow lead to China’s liberalization. 

In reality, it led to the transfer of our industrial base to a foreign rival.In this sense, a zombie “Cold War mentality” never went away — though it certainly stopped making sense. 

Only recently, with help from Xi Jinping’s decision last year to, in effect, declare himself potential leader for life, has Donald Trump become the first president since Richard Nixon to pay attention and run a reality check on China.
Silicon Valley is not alone in its inattention to geopolitical reality; Wall Street has been eager to make excuses for Google’s naïveté. 

The timing is not coincidental; just this week American officials met their Chinese counterparts in Shanghai to negotiate a trade deal.
The flip side of China’s huge trade surplus has been America’s huge current account deficit. 

All of the dollars we send abroad that never get used to buy American goods have to go somewhere, and most go through New York’s money center banks on their way to buying financial assets. 

Since upsetting this imbalance is a threat to profits, Wall Street would prefer to cave on trade and keep Google’s stock price high while they’re at it.
But the banks’ experience of the last few decades of globalization has not been representative. 

The trade deficits that brought flows of money to Wall Street took jobs and bargaining power away from the median worker.Wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. 

The difference between our post-1971 era of globalization and the post-1945 midcentury boom is a breakdown in the relationship between the parts and the whole: An archipelago of inward-looking, parochial places like Wall Street and Silicon Valley have done exceedingly well for themselves while their fellow citizens have been left behind in a stagnant economy.
In the 1950s, the cliché was that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” 

Google makes no such claim for itself; it would be too obviously false. 

Instead, Google says it is “committed to significantly improving the lives of as many people as possible”— a standard so vague as to defy any challenge.
By now we should understand that the real point of talking about what’s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of the country.

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.

Chinese Peril

China's blueprint for global dominance

By Dave Lawler

By the time China's ambitions of displacing the U.S. as the dominant global power were widely understood, Beijing's success had already begun to feel inevitable.
Why it matters: The Chinese Communist Party has exploited America's desire to "sleep through difficulties," writes Jonathan Ward in the new book, "China's Vision of Victory."
He contends that the outcome of the battle for global supremacy remains to be determined, but that the U.S. must quickly and dramatically change course in order to prevail.
The longstanding U.S. strategy of engaging economically while hedging against China's rise militarily was a mistake of historic proportions, essentially "putting wind at the back" of a burgeoning rival, Ward told me in an interview.
In his book, Ward traces China's vision of global preeminence back decades.
He says Xi Jinping merely "took the mask off" in recent years.
Ward, whose research included poring over since-closed Communist Party archives, adds that "the greatest thing China’s given us is a very clear image of what they’re going to do.”
The big picture: The objective is dominance in global affairs on a longer-term time frame.
"So, ideologically the idea is to restore their position — restore because they say they used to be the world’s supreme power and now they’re going to return to that — by the year 2049, which is the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China."
To that end, China is endeavoring to "produce national champions in every sector" and dominate emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and 5G networks.
The Belt and Road network of ports, roads and railways, meanwhile, is intended to impose the "coercive force of the Chinese economy... to build strategic beachheads" around the world.
"In the 19th century we'd understand that as empire building," Ward says.
China's government is mobilizing its economy, its military and its citizens toward the mission of "national rejuvenation."
Ward describes it as "the most comprehensive effort assembled in human history towards a very singular goal.”
The bottom line: “Essentially it's full steam ahead on pretty much every human activity, from space to seabed, with the objective of becoming the world’s leader in all of these things. And with that, you build a foundation of power that is absolutely beyond what can be achieved by any other nation."
“I think it’s easy to understand their strategy. What’s hard is that it’s a good strategy.”
But, but, but: the U.S. "retains enormous advantages in terms of economic and military power, a global alliance system, and leadership in the innumerable institutions built under the Pax Americana."
The consensus that China will replace the U.S. as the world's largest economy is premised on the continuation of the status quo.
Ward argues that "we have to start thinking the unthinkable" now, in terms of unwinding economic ties to China and shifting supply chains to politically friendly countries.
“These are tough things but this is where great minds should be applied," Ward told me.
"How do we retain these economic advantages, the technological advantages, the military advantages. Let’s face it, we’re the ones who’ve already won. We’re just giving it away."
The contests that will define China's success or failure are underway now, and will be decided over the next ten years.
Zoom out: “A contest between the United States and China will be a close-run thing," Ward writes. "However, a contest between China and the democratic world will be impossible for China.”
“In many ways Chinese global strategy is actually focused on Europe.".
China knew the U.S. would eventually wake up to its "problem in the Pacific," but "Europe is a world away from the security questions in Asia.”
“If you’re going to have problems with the U.S., where do you go next? To Europe. That’s where they can harvest technology, it’s where they can harvest education, it’s where they can build their technological advantages. You have to do that by engaging with somebody who’s higher up the value chain, so if they’re going to see that erode in the United States they have to double down on it in Europe."
"That’s the Chinese approach. And they have to convince the Europeans they’re benign. ... What you have to think about in Europe is, what would it mean for your superpower partner to be defeated by authoritarian China?"
The solution is the democratic world consolidating, integrating, pushing back, cutting China off from the things that will enable the continued rise toward their vision of power.
What to watch: "What will it mean for the prevailing norms in international relations to be decided by an authoritarian state where freedoms of speech, press, and assembly are extinguished for its citizens and those under its power?” 
Ward writes that if we lose the next decade, we'll soon find out.
I asked him where the U.S. will find the political will needed to truly embrace this challenge.
He said to watch out for "Sputnik moments."

Tech Quisling

Dunford to meet with Google for debate on Chinese ties
By Aaron Mehta 

It is safe to say that the Pentagon and Google are very different places. But that gap could harm U.S. national security. 

WASHINGTON — For the second time in a week, the Pentagon’s top uniformed officer has taken a shot at Google, warning that the tech company’s investments in China are doing long-term damage to America’s security.
But Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he also plans to meet with the tech giant to debate about its roles and responsibilities as a commercial enterprise versus how much the firm owes to America as its home nation.
“In my judgment, Google assisting the Chinese military in advancing technologically is not in U.S. national interests, so it’s a debate we have to have,” Dunford said at a Thursday event hosted by the Atlantic Council.
His comments followed up on statements made in a Senate hearing last week, where he said Google was benefiting the Chinese military by its operations in the communist nation. 

Asked to follow up on those conversations Thursday, the chairman expressed the belief that no company can do work in China without it being siphoned off.
“If a company does business in China, they are automatically going to be required to have a cell of the Communist Party in that company,” he said. 

“And that is going to lead to that intellectual property from that company finding its way to the Chinese military. It is a distinction without a difference between the Chinese Communist Party, the government and the Chinese military.”
“Ventures to help develop artificial intelligence in China are going to do two things. They are going to help an authoritarian government to assert control [over] its own population. Again, our country exists for the individual. China exists for the Chinese communist party,” he continued.
“The second thing it’s going to do is it’s going to enable the Chinese military to take advantage of the technology that is developed in the United States. Why is it developed in the United States? Why is Silicon Valley in the United States? Because of our system of government in enabling of individual ideas to bubble up and advance the world, whether it’s medically, education, artificial intelligence, you name it.”

Dunford added that he has plans to meet with Google executives in the near future, likely next week.
“I just think we need to have a debate about that. We ought not to think that it is just about business when we do business in China,” he said. 

“This is about us looking at the second- and third-order effects of our business ventures in China, the Chinese form of government, and the impact it’s going to have on the United States’ ability to maintain a competitive military advantage and all that goes into it.
“I’m happy to have that debate. This is not about me and Google.”
The issue Dunford identifies is indeed wider than Google, with China a prime target for just about every major American industrial concern. 

His comments also come from a situation where members of the tech and defense communities appear to often talk past each other and regard the other with suspicion.
That said, Google is an easy target inside the Pentagon. 

Not only did parts of the company revolt against working on the department’s Project Maven last year, leading to Google’s exit entirely from the program, but the company has opened a major AI center in China — despite statements from Eric Schmidt, then the head of parent company Alphabet, that the U.S. and China are in an AI arms race.
“In the case of Google they were highlighted because they have an artificial intelligence venture in China. I think it is a reasonable assertion, even in an open venue like this, to assert the benefit of that venture for artificial intelligence for China, one of many ventures of our companies that are there, indirectly benefits the Chinese military and creates a challenge for us to [maintain] a competitive advantage,” Dunford said.
It’s not just AI where China’s influence on the commercial sector is butting up against the Pentagon’s interests.
Asked about the potential risks of a Chinese-built 5G network, Dunford called it a “critical national security issue” that needs to be addressed not just in the U.S. but with allied nations.
“Our relationships rely on trust, and that trust, in part, is the assurance that the data that we exchange, the intelligence we share, the information we share can be done in a way where it’s not compromised. And the issue of 5G addresses both potential vulnerabilities in our systems due to how reliant we will be on 5G for the internet of things, our combat systems, but also exchanging information with our allies and partners,” he said.
"So we very much believe that any future capability along the lines of 5G has to be trusted, and we’re concerned that we’re moving in the direction where if we don’t get out in front in that regard we won’t be able to trust 5G and will be at a competitive disadvantage,” the chairman concluded. 

“I think American industry needs to step out and dominate 5G because it will be in our national interest to do so.”

George Soros: China is using tech advances to repress its people

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are being used for authoritarian control

By Larry Elliott in Davos

George Soros delivers a speech at his dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

The billionaire philanthropist George Soros has delivered a stinging attack on China with a warning that Xi Jinping’s regime is using breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence to repress its people.
Soros used his annual dinner at the World Economic Forum to say Xi was the most dangerous opponent of open societies and to call on the west to crack down on Chinese tech companies that were being used as a means of authoritarian control.
“I want to call attention to the mortal danger facing open societies from the instruments of control that machine learning and artificial intelligence can put in the hands of repressive regimes. I’ll focus on China, where Xi Jinping wants a one-party state to reign supreme,” Soros said.

The former hedge fund dealer said that in China all “the rapidly expanding information available about a person is going to be consolidated in a centralised database to create a ‘social credit system’.
“Based on that data, people will be evaluated by algorithms that will determine whether they pose a threat to the one-party state. People will then be treated accordingly.”
China, he added, was not the only authoritarian regime in the world, but it was the wealthiest, strongest and most developed in machine learning and AI.
Soros said there was an undeclared struggle between the west and China over governance of the internet. 

China wanted to dictate rules and procedures that governed the digital economy by dominating the developing world with its new platforms and technologies.
“Last year I still believed that China ought to be more deeply embedded in the institutions of global governance, but since then Xi Jinping’s behaviour has changed my opinion,” he said.

“My present view is that instead of waging a trade war with practically the whole world, the US should focus on China. Instead of letting [the Chinese tech companies] ZTE and Huawei off lightly, it needs to crack down on them.
“If these companies came to dominate the 5G market, they would present an unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world.”
Soros said Trump was taking the wrong approach to China: making concessions to Beijing and declaring victory while renewing his attacks on US allies.
“This is liable to undermine the US policy objective of curbing China’s abuses and excesses. The reality is that we are in a cold war that threatens to turn into a hot one.”

Public Enemy Number One

China’s Xi Jinping most dangerous to free societies, says George Soros
By Joe Miller

The billionaire philanthropist George Soros has used his annual speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to launch a scathing attack on China and its dictator Xi Jinping.
Mr Soros warned that artificial intelligence and machine learning could be used to entrench totalitarian control in the country.
He said this scenario presented an "unprecedented danger".
But he said the Chinese people were his "main source of hope".
"China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it is the wealthiest, strongest and technologically most advanced," he said, noting concerns too about Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Security risk
"This makes Xi Jinping the most dangerous opponent of open societies," he said.
Mr Soros, a prominent donor to the Democratic Party in the US, also criticised the Trump administration's stance towards China.
"Instead of waging a trade war with practically the whole world, the US should focus on China," he said.
He urged Washington to crack down on Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and ZTE, which he said present an "unacceptable security risk for the rest of the world".
More broadly, Mr Soros cautioned that repressive regimes could utilise technology to control their citizens, in what he called "a mortal threat to open societies".

The 88-year-old Hungarian-born Jewish businessman, who survived Nazi occupation by forging identity documents, became infamous for his involvement in the devaluation of the British pound, known as Black Wednesday.

But it is his philanthropic and political activities that have made him a divisive figure in the US, Europe and beyond.
He has spent billions of his own money funding human rights projects and liberal democratic ventures around the world, and has become a frequent target for criticism by right-wing groups due to his support for liberal causes.
Much of the criticism aimed at him has been criticised as having anti-Semitic undertones.
Last year, a suspect package was found in a post box at his home in New York.
Mr Soros used his Davos speech last year to lambast tech giants such as Facebook, and what he considered to be their corrosive effect on democratic systems.
But this year, he directed his wrath towards Beijing, and particularly its controversial "Belt and Road" investment plan, which pays for road, rail and sea links to boost trade with countries around the world.
"It was designed to promote the interests of China, not the interests of the recipient countries," he said.
"Its ambitious infrastructure projects were mainly financed by loans, not by grants, and foreign officials were bribed to accept them."

China’s Media Forecast is Bleak and Stormy

Spring Festival is coming, but the country's politics remain frozen.
BY SARAH COOK
The Year of the Dog saw Chinese journalists and bloggers kept on a tighter leash than ever. 

Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party moved aggressively to control reporting on threats to the economy, block or shut down popular social media applications, and reduce avenues for jumping the so-called Great Firewall’s censorship. 

The Year of the Pig, which starts on Feb. 5, doesn’t look much better—but could also see the start of some serious pushback globally, as the world becomes more aware of Beijing’s propaganda-fueled efforts to influence foreign audiences. 

Here are five takeaways for China’s information control strategies in the new lunar year.

1. Big dates, new crackdowns. 

The Year of the Pig is replete with politically sensitive anniversaries: 60 years since the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet in March, a century since the launch of the influential May 4 student movement, 30 years since the June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, a decade since a major bout of unrest and intensified restrictions in East Turkestan in early July, 20 years since the party launched its campaign against the Falun Gong spiritual movement later that month, and the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic in October.
Those dates often bring extra censorship even on less significant anniversaries, and regulators seem especially keen to preempt any potential expressions of dissent in 2019. 

On Jan. 3, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced the launch of a new campaign against vaguely defined “negative and harmful information” online. 

It is set to last six months and has already included instructions to the web portals Baidu and Sohu to suspend their news services for one week this month in order to “root out undesirable content.”
As the various anniversaries pass, spikes in censorship will be tracked by monitors such as Weiboscope; localized internet shutdowns and travel restrictions will affect regions such as Tibet and East Turkestan; and arrests or involuntary “vacations” will be imposed on prominent democracy advocates, grassroots activists, and ordinary Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhist, and Uighur Muslim believers. 

If the past is any indication, at least some of the repressive measures deployed and the jail sentences imposed will last far beyond the anniversary year itself.

2. First iCloud arrest. 

The 2017 Cybersecurity Law stipulates that foreign companies must store Chinese users’ cloud data on servers located in China. 

To meet this requirement, Apple announced last January that iCloud data would be transferred to servers run by a company called Guizhou on the Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which is owned by the Guizhou provincial government. 

Apple and GCBD now both have access to iCloud data, including photos and other content.
Personal communications and information from platforms such as WeChat, QQ, Twitter, and Skype have increasingly been used by Chinese authorities to detain or convict people for their peaceful political or religious speech. 

This makes it only a matter of time before American companies with localized data centers become complicit in a politicized arrest. 

Apple has already proved its willingness to comply with Chinese government demands that violate basic freedoms by removing hundreds of apps used to circumvent censorship or access foreign news services from its mobile store in China.
Other companies to watch include the U.S.-based note-taking app Evernote, which transferred user data to Tencent Cloud last year, and various blockchain platforms, which as of next month will be required to implement real-name registration, monitor content, and store user data.

3. Financial news frozen. 

Last year, Chinese censors intensified their focus on controlling business and economic news—usually relatively openly reported topics compared with political or cultural issues—amid a trade war with the United States and slowing growth at home. 

Propaganda and censorship authorities actively intervened to suppress negative reporting on a staggering economy by suspending online portals’ financial news channels, issuing regular directives to editors to carefully manage their coverage, and providing monthly ideological trainings to journalists at financial news outlets.
This year, censors have already told the media not to report information on layoffs in the tech sector and restricted the circulation of a speech by a prominent economist, who said the government had made serious economic miscalculations in 2018. 

As the slowdown intensifies and its impact is felt across a wider range of sectors, the authorities are expected to tighten their control over the news and work to prevent—and prosecute—leaks of negative financial data and analysis.

4. Big data efforts. 

Reports emerge weekly of pilot initiatives in which Chinese authorities attempt to incorporate artificial intelligence and other technological aids into existing control mechanisms. 

The more benign examples include efforts to identify and fine jaywalkers, limit illegal subletting in public housing, encourage good manners on public transportation, and improve student attendance at school. 

Yet even these cases involve considerable restrictions on privacy, possible false positives, and enormous potential for abuse. 

And in other instances, similar technologies are being deployed for more obviously repressive purposes, such as censoring politically sensitive images on WeChat or identifying potential targets for forced re-education in East Turkestan.
Previous cases have been experimental or limited to certain geographical locations. 

But as these advanced systems for social and political control are refined, and as the government proceeds with its plans for a national social credit system, centralized surveillance is becoming the new norm.

5. Stronger pushback against influence abroad. 

The past two years have seen international society become far more sharply aware of the threat posed by the Chinese government’s foreign influence operations. 

Policymakers and civil society actors in democratic countries have mobilized to more critically examine Beijing’s media engagement and investment practices.
In the United States, the Justice Department has urged the Xinhua news agency and China Central Television (CCTV) to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, closing an important gap in the law’s enforcement. 

In Ghana, the local independent broadcasters’ association raised concerns about a potential contract with a Chinese firm to build the country’s digital television infrastructure. 

Britain’s media regulator is reviewing CCTV’s license following complaints that it had participated in the filming and airing of forced confessions by detainees, including activists and journalists. 

And a host of countries, such as Australia, Japan, and Norway, have restricted or are reconsidering the Chinese firm Huawei’s involvement in current or future telecommunications infrastructure projects.
China’s leaders will continue their ambitious, and at times covert or coercive, drive to influence foreign media and information environments, but Chinese state-run outlets, telecom firms, and even diplomats are now far more likely to encounter legal and other obstacles in democratic settings.
The Chinese Communist Party’s apparatus for information control will be more technologically sophisticated than ever this year, and the leadership under Xi will press it to the limits of its capacity. That the regime believes this is necessary suggests a deep insecurity—about its own historical legacies, about the crisis of legitimacy that a slowing economy creates for an unelected government, and about the ways even the smallest expressions of public anger can snowball online and offline. Censorship, propaganda, and surveillance may seem necessary to the regime, but they are hardly sufficient. 

The authorities’ efforts continue to intensify because they are never entirely successful. 

While the government’s information controls will likely bulk up during the Year of the Pig, they will come no closer to flying.

Inside China’s surveillance state

From schoolchildren to political dissidents: how technology is tracking a nation 
By Louise Lucas and Emily Feng

Zhejiang Hangzhou No 11 High School, on the fringes of downtown Hangzhou in eastern China, is a green, peaceful-seeming place to learn.
Gazebo-like structures nestle among lush foliage; grey stone sculptures enact eternal dioramas and Japanese maples gently fan placid lakes. 
It is also a digital panopticon.
A surveillance system, powered by facial recognition and artificial intelligence, tracks the state school’s 1,010 pupils, informing teachers which students are late or have missed class, while in the café, their menu choices leave a digital dietary footprint that staff can monitor to see who is gorging on too much fatty food. 
In May, The People’s Daily, a state-run media group, tweeted approvingly about the school’s use of cameras to monitor, via their facial expressions, how children were engaging in class.
Had this classroom-based part of the programme not been abruptly halted later that month in the wake of local controversy, it would also have been deployed to predict which pupils (the slouching ones) were likely to underperform.
Welcome to China, where AI is being pressed into service as handmaiden to an authoritarian government.
For many critics, this seems fraught with danger: an Orwellian world where “Big Brother” is always watching, able to spy on anyone from human rights lawyers to political dissidents and persecuted minorities.
For supporters, it is near utopian: a land where criminals and miscreants are easily weeded out, where no one can cheat, where good behaviour is rewarded and the bad punished.
The latter vision is the Chinese government’s stated aim.
By 2020, a national video surveillance network will be “omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully controllable”, according to an official paper released in 2015. 

Visitors try out facial-recognition technology at the China Public Security Expo in Shenzhen last year 

The idea of constant monitoring is not unprecedented in China.
Indeed, the name of the government’s 2020 project — xueliang, or “sharp eyes” — is a throwback to a Communist party slogan, “The people have sharp eyes”, referencing the totalitarian ploy of encouraging neighbours to spy on their neighbours.  
Under Mao Zedong, cities were split into grids of socialist work units where access to rations, housing and other benefits was enforced by local spies who reported wayward behaviour from their neighbours.
This system of social control had in turn been built on a model of communal self-policing introduced centuries before, during the Song dynasty.  
Today, the grid system has been revived, manned by an extensive network of volunteer and part-time lookouts.
In more troubled regions such as East Turkestan and Tibet, armed police booths dot street corners. Beijing has about 850,000 “informants” patrolling its streets, according to state media.
Renewing these old-school tactics is a deliberate decision: the government knows that while surveillance technology is advancing rapidly, it is far from perfect. 
Cheetah Mobile is a Chinese company whose subsidiary’s facial-recognition vending machine scored top in an international facial-recognition test last year sponsored by Microsoft Research.
But Fu Sheng, its founder and chief executive, concedes it has a long way to go in terms of spotting faces in crowds.
“The human is an excellent product,” he tells the FT.
“No technology can exceed it.” 
 That may not matter.
When the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham envisaged his panopticon penitentiary in the late 18th century — a circular building with an inspection tower at its centre — the idea was that inmates would never know if they were being observed or not.
This “simple idea in architecture” would offer “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”, Bentham wrote.
For some analysts looking at the impact of China’s growing surveillance state, any technological shortcomings are incidental.
Like the panopticon itself, it is the fear of being watched that is the most powerful tool of all.

“There’s a wave of enhanced surveillance going on worldwide,” says Rogier Creemers, who studies Chinese governance at Leiden University.
The difference in China is the historical context: “Liberal democratic institutions are based on the notion that state power must lie in the hands of the population. There are things the state is just not supposed to know or do,” he says.
“China starts from a different point of view — that a strong empowered state is necessary, in order to drag the nation forward. In China, surveillance is almost a logical extension of what the state is supposed to do, because the state is supposed to keep people safe.” 
 Feng Xiang is translating the Old Testament book of Jeremiah when the FT visits his office at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
A prominent legal scholar, he has been studying AI and its implications for jobs, society and capitalism in China.
 His view is a gloomy one.
As he sees it, public surveillance via CCTV cameras is being rapidly supplemented by a range of more insidious data collectors-cum-tracking devices: the smartphones in almost half of all Chinese citizens’ pockets. 
This will eventually create a world devoid of privacy. 
 “It’s not like George Orwell’s 1984, but it’s like a new way of life,” says Feng, noting that even a hike in a scenic park or up a mountain in China today can involve mandatory fingerprinting by police. “In the old days at least you had somewhere you could hide, or where you can do your private things. But now the assumption is people know where you are.”
 Against the backdrop of deepening surveillance, the Chinese government is introducing a “social credit system”.
First described in an official document in 2014 and now being piloted in various forms in several cities, the idea is that people will ultimately be scored based on past behaviour, taking in misdemeanours such as traffic offences and court records. 
 At present, a good financial credit score, handed out by some companies and operating rather like a loyalty programme, can confer benefits such as waived deposits on shared bikes or preferential loan rates.
A poor social credit score, by comparison, could jeopardise a university place, rule out certain jobs and even limit travel: more than 10.5 million people have been barred from buying airline or high-speed train tickets, according to the Supreme Court, since a debtors blacklist was launched. 
 Meanwhile, the technology by which the government can track people is constantly evolving.
Facial recognition is increasingly used to unlock smartphones in China, and thanks to its multiple commercial applications — from allowing easy payment in a grocery store to home security — it has attracted a slew of venture capital from across the world.
One tech banker dismisses facial recognition to the FT as “kindergarten stuff” compared with what will come next. 

Police in Zhengzhou wearing AI-powered smart glasses with facial-recognition capability in April this year 

Some of China’s leading facial-recognition players, for example, are now moving into gait recognition.
Hanwang Technology was an early entrant in the field: it was forced to rethink its fingerprint-recognition technology when the Sars epidemic of 2003 left people in China terrified of physical contact. 
 “We can see the human figure and his gait, so if his cap is pulled down [we] can still recognise him,” explains Liu Changping, president of the Beijing-based company.
The Chinese authorities already have a decent video database to build on, he adds: “If [someone] was put in prison before, there’s video of him walking around.”
 Although China is expanding its surveillance network nationwide, it is in the western region of East Turkestan that the technology is being put to its most extreme use.
The region has been closely policed since 2009, when deadly riots broke out between the 11 million-strong Muslim Uighur population and the minority Han Chinese.
East Turkestan is a vast region, and a relatively poor one, making the multitude of gleaming cameras and sophisticated technology — inside bazaars, schools and even mosques — all the more incongruous amid the expanses of desert and empty roads. 
 Residents were unwilling to talk on the record about their experiences, for fear of repercussions, but it is clear that normal life has changed irrevocably for the Uighurs.
Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet and film-maker who fled China and is now based in the US, tells the FT about the day he and his wife were ordered to visit their local police station and leave voice recordings, fingerprints, DNA swabs and, of course, high-resolution video footage of their faces making various expressions.
 “I am a director, I make films, and I have seen many kinds of cameras. But I had never seen a camera that strange. They adjusted [the] camera to my eye level. They had me look up and look forward and down, left and right and back,” Hamut recalls.
“They did the same for females . . . they had the women pucker their lips and filmed that. Every step had to be completed perfectly; each expression could not be done too quickly or slowly. If you made a face too fast, the computer would ask you to stop and have you repeat it again. I had to try many times. Many people had to spend an hour to complete this facial filming.” 

Mandatory surveillance software is installed on residents’ mobile phones to scan for Islamic keywords and pictures.
Some people told the FT that anyone found to have shared illicit material would be sent to the region’s extensive network of extralegal detention camps, where hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have already been imprisoned.
Making too many phone calls to or from anywhere outside of East Turkestan can also result in detention.
As a result, Uighurs living in East Turkestan can go years without speaking to family members working in coastal cities like Beijing or Shanghai. 
 Facial recognition, intrusive as it is, is only one of the tools the authorities are using to monitor residents.
Last year police were told to conduct DNA swabs, iris scans and blood tests using a specially designed mobile app and health checks, in order to build a region-wide biometric database. 
 None of this is cheap.
Overall public security spending in the region was Rmb57.95bn ($9.16bn) in 2017, a 10-fold increase over the previous decade.
That has proved a windfall for Chinese security companies.
The government’s investment in public-private partnerships in security has also increased, from $27.3m in 2015 to at least $1.1bn in 2017, based on a tally of existing public tenders and Bank of China data.
Among the largest of these privately funded projects is in East Turkestan’s Shache county, where almost 100 people were killed in 2014 in what state media called a terrorist attack.
The network there will include a video surveillance centre, cloud storage facilities and a drone system. 
 Smaller companies are also getting a slice of the action, especially government-backed start-ups with the right connections.
Meiya Pico, a private company based in the coastal Fujian province, was selected to develop a desktop version of the mobile-surveillance software that East Turkestan residents were forced to download this year.
The software is now installed on the computers of all public companies and academic institutions. Several East Turkestan academics told the FT that authorities are now alerted if illicit files are accessed. 
Meiya Pico’s management frequently meets with high-level officials from the Communist party and the state security apparatus, according to articles and pictures on its website.
Indeed, many Chinese tech companies talk proudly of working to further the government’s aims. “Our business is dictated by the political requirements of our country. ‘Maintaining stability’ is China’s national security priority so East Turkestan really needs our products. The province is our largest client by far,” says Wang Wufei, a sales director at X-Face, a Shenzhen-based company that makes facial-recognition software and hardware.
In June, X-Face won a contract to supply 200 security checkpoints in East Turkestan. 
 Scarier still is what comes next.
A Shenzhen start-up making grenade-bearing drones predicts the East Turkestan authorities will become its largest client.
Another, East Turkestan-based Zhenkong, which specialises in signal-interference technology and has received funding from the East Turkestan border police, sounds a bellicose note.
“The government needs entrepreneurs like us,” says Ge Guangxu, its president.
“There is no second place in war. We need to be prepared.”

Three centuries ago, Jeremy Bentham suggested his panopticon would lead to “morals reformed . . . industry invigorated . . . public burthens lightened”.
China’s facial-technology players sound an eerily similar note.
Megvii and SenseTime, two of the country’s biggest facial-recognition companies, claim their technology has apprehended thousands of criminals — all without the need for armies of people to watch hours and hours of CCTV footage.
Both have attracted billions of dollars in funding, from Chinese and Russian state funds as well as stars of the Chinese tech scene such as Alibaba.

A statue in honour of Mao Zedong next to CCTV cameras in Tiananmen Square, Beijing 

Qi Yin, co-founder and chief executive of Megvii, notes the myriad uses of his company’s Face++ technology, such as in fintech payments.
But for him, surveillance is king: “I believe this will be the largest one in the next three years.” Megvii counts on the government for 40 per cent of its business and describes its work as profiling rather than just identifying.
Someone who regularly appears in video from a subway station but is not an employee could be a thief, says Xie Yinan, a vice-president at Face++, and the information — in the form of code — is sent to the police.
 One of the surveillance industry’s recent — and much publicised — success stories took place at a pop concert in eastern China.
While Jacky Cheung, a Hong Kong pop star (rebranded a “fugitive trapper” by the Chinese media) crooned, cameras were automatically sweeping the audience. 
 Facial-recognition technology picked out four men accused of crimes — including a ticket scalper and a greengrocer accused of a Rmb110,000 potato scam in 2015.
“Smiling as he approached his idol, he did not realise he had already been spotted,” Jiaxing police gloated in a social-media post. 
 Aside from its uses in law enforcement, AI-aided surveillance is also being touted as a tool for industry.
Hanwang Technology, China’s grandfather of facial recognition, has sold its surveillance system to construction sites, enabling managers to track how many hours workers are on site and who is slacking. 
 Another company, LLVision, produces smart sunglasses with built-in facial recognition; these became famous after police in Zhengzhou were photographed wearing them to monitor travellers at train stations earlier this year.
But the company has also been supplying them to manufacturing plants for use in time management and quality control.
 “[Even] if you have 10,000 people checking [machines and workforces] globally, they cannot manage and audit and analyse their checking,” says Fei Wu, chief executive and founder of LLVision.
“Nor can you see that worker A is working faster than worker B, or how you get more people to work like worker A.”
 Wu, a graduate of the UK’s Birmingham University, raised money to produce the sunglasses through crowdfunding and spent three years trialling them.
They have been worn by surgeons in theatre to record or broadcast surgery.
There is even demand among insurers, he says, to use the glasses to recognise cows — farmers have been known to claim insurance on the same deceased bovine twice. 
But, as with so many other Chinese companies in this field, a key client for LLVision is the Public Security Bureau.
Think of it, says Wu.
There are almost 1.4 billion people in China.
“But the PSB is done by a few million people. Medical treatment is done by a few million people. Education is done by a few million people . . . There’s a huge gap to fill, so tech must play a big role.” As the technology to enable mass surveillance and identification becomes more sophisticated, governments across the world will face dilemmas over when and how to use it.
One overseas minister on a trip to China was awed by the technology he was shown, according to Wu, briefly fretting at his country’s strict privacy rules before concluding that in the case of a wanted criminal, everyone would want him to be caught. 
 Germany unleashed a wave of criticism when it began piloting facial recognition to help track and catch suspected terrorists, while the UK’s independent CCTV watchdog wrote to police chiefs last year raising concerns about the increasing use of facial-recognition technology to monitor crowds. Earlier this year, about 40 civil liberties groups wrote to Amazon urging it to halt sales of its Rekognition software, which the company has promoted as offering “real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos”.
The product, which has been sold to a number of US police forces, “poses a grave threat to communities, including people of colour and immigrants”, the campaigners said. 
 Then there are China’s own exports, particularly to developing countries under the “ One Belt One Road” initiative.
One such deal, to Zimbabwe, could highlight another key problem with facial-recognition technology, which learns according to the data it is fed: an MIT and Stanford University study found error rates of 20-34 per cent for determining the gender of darker-skinned women compared with less than 1 per cent for light-skinned men.

 The rise of mass surveillance yields reams of data, and therein lies one of the big dangers for any country going down this road, says Nuala O’Connor, chief executive of the US-based Center for Democracy and Technology.
“The risks are the creation of a pervasive and permanent database of individual images for law enforcement, but then used for other purposes, perhaps by government actors,” she says.
 Some 530 camera and video surveillance patents were filed by Chinese groups last year, according to the research firm CB Insights — more than five times the number applied for in the US.
Unhindered by worries about privacy or individual rights, China’s deepening specialism has attracted global customers and investors.
“The surveillance industry is still in the growth phase,” proclaimed analysts at Jefferies, the New York-based investment bank. 
 Hikvision, a company majority owned by two Chinese state entities whose surveillance systems have been used everywhere from East Turkestan to US military bases, was selected to join the MSCI Emerging Markets Index — a global equity benchmark — in June.
Its Chinese-listed shares have risen nearly fivefold over five years. 
 In Hangzhou, a start-up called Rokid is preparing to release augmented-reality glasses next year. Outside its lakeside office, the company’s founder Mingming Zhu — known as Misa — demonstrates a prototype pair to the FT.
The glasses are aimed at consumers rather than law enforcement: walking into a party, for example, their facial-recognition technology means you could immediately see the names of guests superimposed above their heads; the glasses could potentially also add information from their social-media feeds. 
 They look cool, but there is something spooky about getting the lowdown on people without so much as a “hello”, and Misa sounds a note of caution.
“We are making something happen but we have to be very careful. With AI we have a bright side and a dark side. The most difficult thing you are working on right now might bring you to someplace wrong.”

Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras

By Paul Mozur

A video showing facial recognition software in use at the headquarters of the artificial intelligence company Megvii in Beijing.

ZHENGZHOU, China — In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station.
In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival.
In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor.
With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. 

Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. 

It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.
“In the past, it was all about instinct,” said Shan Jun, the deputy chief of the police at the railway station in Zhengzhou, where the heroin smuggler was caught. 

“If you missed something, you missed it.”
China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a great democratizer, bringing people more freedom and connecting them to the world. 

In China, it has brought control.

Megvii employees at the company’s offices in Beijing.

In some cities, cameras scan train stations for China’s most wanted. 

Billboard-size displays show the faces of jaywalkers and list the names of people who don’t pay their debts. 

Facial recognition scanners guard the entrances to housing complexes. 

Already, China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras — four times as many as the United States.
Such efforts supplement other systems that track internet use and communications, hotel stays, train and plane trips and even car travel in some places.
Even so, China’s ambitions outstrip its abilities. 

Technology in place at one train station or crosswalk may be lacking in another city, or even the next block over. 

Bureaucratic inefficiencies prevent the creation of a nationwide network.
For the Communist Party, that may not matter. 

Far from hiding their efforts, Chinese authorities regularly state, and overstate, their capabilities. 

In China, even the perception of surveillance can keep the public in line.
Some places are further along than others. 

Invasive mass-surveillance software has been set up in the west to track members of the Uighur Muslim minority and map their relations with friends and family, according to software viewed by The New York Times.
“This is potentially a totally new way for the government to manage the economy and society,” said Martin Chorzempa, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“The goal is algorithmic governance,” he added.
Police officers wearing A.I.-powered smart glasses in Luoyang.
The Shame Game
The intersection south of Changhong Bridge in the city of Xiangyang used to be a nightmare. 

Cars drove fast and jaywalkers darted into the street.
Then last summer, the police put up cameras linked to facial recognition technology and a big, outdoor screen. 

Photos of lawbreakers were displayed alongside their names and government I.D. numbers. 

People were initially excited to see their faces on the board, said Guan Yue, a spokeswoman, until propaganda outlets told them it was punishment.
“If you are captured by the system and you don’t see it, your neighbors or colleagues will, and they will gossip about it,” she said. 

“That’s too embarrassing for people to take.”
China’s new surveillance is based on an old idea: Only strong authority can bring order to a turbulent country. 

Mao Zedong took that philosophy to devastating ends, as his top-down rule brought famine and then the Cultural Revolution.
His successors also craved order but feared the consequences of totalitarian rule. 

They formed a new understanding with the Chinese people. 

In exchange for political impotence, they would be mostly left alone and allowed to get rich.
It worked. 

Censorship and police powers remained strong, but China’s people still found more freedom. 

That new attitude helped usher in decades of breakneck economic growth.
Today, that unwritten agreement is breaking down.
China’s economy isn’t growing at the same pace. 

It suffers from a severe wealth gap. 

After four decades of fatter paychecks and better living, its people have higher expectations.
Tourists waiting to visit the Mao Mausoleum in Beijing, under a pole holding 11 surveillance cameras.
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has moved to solidify his power. 

Changes to Chinese law mean he could rule longer than any leader since Mao. 

And he has undertaken a broad corruption crackdown that could make him plenty of enemies.
For support, he has turned to the Mao-era beliefs in the importance of a cult of personality and the role of the Communist Party in everyday life. 

Technology gives him the power to make it happen.
“Reform and opening has already failed, but no one dares to say it,” said Chinese historian Zhang Lifan, citing China’s four-decade post-Mao policy. 

“The current system has created severe social and economic segregation. So now the rulers use the taxpayers’ money to monitor the taxpayers.”
Xi has launched a major upgrade of the Chinese surveillance state. 

China has become the world’s biggest market for security and surveillance technology, with analysts estimating the country will have almost 300 million cameras installed by 2020. 

Chinese buyers will snap up more than three-quarters of all servers designed to scan video footage for faces, predicts IHS Markit, a research firm. 

China’s police will spend an additional $30 billion in the coming years on techno-enabled snooping, according to one expert quoted in state media.
Government contracts are fueling research and development into technologies that track faces, clothing and even a person’s gait. 

Experimental gadgets, like facial-recognition glasses, have begun to appear.
Judging public Chinese reaction can be difficult in a country where the news media is controlled by the government. 

Still, so far the average Chinese citizen appears to show little concern. 

Erratic enforcement of laws against everything from speeding to assault means the long arm of China’s authoritarian government can feel remote from everyday life. 

As a result, many cheer on new attempts at law and order.
“It’s one of the biggest intersections in the city,” said Wang Fukang, a college student who volunteered as a guard at the crosswalk in Xiangyang. 

“It’s important that it stays safe and orderly.”
At the Shanghai headquarters of the artificial intelligence start-up Yitu, a network of cameras linked to a facial recognition system monitors employees and can track their movements in the office.

The Surveillance Start-Up
Start-ups often make a point of insisting their employees use their technology. 

In Shanghai, a company called Yitu has taken that to the extreme.
The halls of its offices are dotted with cameras, looking for faces. 

From desk to break room to exit, employees’ paths are traced on a television screen with blue dotted lines. 

The monitor shows their comings and goings, all day, everyday.
In China, snooping is becoming big business. 

As the country spends heavily on surveillance, a new generation of start-ups have risen to meet the demand.
Chinese companies are developing globally competitive applications like image and voice recognition. 

Yitu took first place in a 2017 open contest for facial recognition algorithms held by the United States government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 

A number of other Chinese companies also scored well.
A technology boom in China is helping the government’s surveillance ambitions. 

In sheer scale and investment, China already rivals Silicon Valley. 

Between the government and eager investors, surveillance start-ups have access to plenty of money and other resources.
In May, the upstart A.I. company SenseTime raised $620 million, giving it a valuation of about $4.5 billion. 

Yitu raised $200 million last month. 

Another rival, Megvii, raised $460 million from investors that included a state-backed fund created by China’s top leadership.
At a conference in May at an upscale hotel in Beijing, China’s security-industrial complex offered its vision of the future. 

Companies big and small showed off facial-recognition security gates and systems that track cars around cities to local government officials, tech executives and investors.
Private companies see big potential in China’s surveillance build-out. 

China’s public security market was valued at more than $80 billion last year but could be worth even more as the country builds its capabilities, said Shen Xinyang, a former Google data scientist who is now chief technology officer of Eyecool, a start-up.
“Artificial intelligence for public security is actually still a very insignificant portion of the whole market,” he said, pointing out that most equipment currently in use was “nonintelligent.”
Many of these businesses are already providing data to the government.
Mr. Shen told the group that his company had surveillance systems at more than 20 airports and train stations, which had helped catch 1,000 criminals. 

Eyecool, he said, is also handing over two million facial images each day to a burgeoning big-data police system called Skynet.
At a building complex in Xiangyang, a facial-recognition system set up to let residents quickly through security gates adds to the police’s collection of photos of local residents, according to local Chinese Communist Party officials.
Wen Yangli, an executive at Number 1 Community, which makes the product, said the company is at work on other applications. 

One would detect when crowds of people are clashing. 

Another would allow police to use virtual maps of buildings to find out who lives where.
China’s surveillance companies are also looking to test the appetite for high-tech surveillance abroad. Yitu says it has been expanding overseas, with plans to increase business in regions like Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
At home, China is preparing its people for next-level surveillance technology. 

A recent state-media propaganda film called “Amazing China” showed off a similar virtual map that provided police with records of utility use, saying it could be used for predictive policing.
“If there are anomalies, the system sends an alert,” a narrator says, as Chinese police officers pay a visit to an apartment with a record of erratic utility use. 

The film then quotes one of the officers: “No matter which corner you escape to, we’ll bring you to justice.”

A video showing facial recognition software in use at the Megvii showroom in Beijing.

Enter the Panopticon
For technology to be effective, it doesn’t always have to work. 

Take China’s facial-recognition glasses.
Police in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou recently showed off the specs at a high-speed rail station for state media and others. 

They snapped photos of a policewoman peering from behind the shaded lenses.
But the glasses work only if the target stands still for several seconds. 

They have been used mostly to check travelers for fake identifications.
China’s national database of individuals it has flagged for watching — including suspected terrorists, criminals, drug traffickers, political activists and others — includes 20 million to 30 million people, said one technology executive who works closely with the government. 

That is too many people for today’s facial recognition technology to parse, said the executive, who asked not to be identified because the information wasn’t public.
The system remains more of a digital patchwork than an all-seeing technological network. 

Many files still aren’t digitized, and others are on mismatched spreadsheets that can’t be easily reconciled. 

Systems that police hope will someday be powered by A.I. are currently run by teams of people sorting through photos and data the old-fashioned way.
Take, for example, the crosswalk in Xiangyang. 

The images don’t appear instantaneously. 

The billboard often shows jaywalkers from weeks ago, though authorities have recently reduced the lag to about five or six days. 

Officials said humans still sift through the images to match them to people’s identities.
Still, Chinese authorities who are generally mum about security have embarked on a campaign to persuade the country’s people that the high-tech security state is already in place.
China’s propagandists are fond of stories in which police use facial recognition to spot wanted criminals at events. 

An article in People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, covered a series of arrests made with the aid of facial recognition at concerts of the pop star Jackie Cheung. 

The piece referenced some of the singer’s lyrics: “You are a boundless net of love that easily trapped me.”
In many places, it works. 

At the intersection in Xiangyang, jaywalking has decreased. 

At the building complex where Number 1 Community’s facial-recognition gate system has been installed, a problem with bike theft ceased entirely, according to building management.
An outdoor screen in Xiangyang displays photos of jaywalkers alongside their names and I.D. numbers. The idea is to embarrass offenders into compliance.

“The whole point is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored, and that uncertainty makes people more obedient,” said Mr. Chorzempa, the Peterson Institute fellow.
He described the approach as a panopticon, the idea that people will follow the rules precisely because they don’t know whether they are being watched.
In Zhengzhou, police were happy to explain how just the thought of the facial recognition glasses could get criminals to confess.
Mr. Shan, the Zhengzhou railway station deputy police chief, cited the time his department grabbed a heroin smuggler. 

While questioning the suspect, Mr. Shan said, police pulled out the glasses and told the man that what he said didn’t matter. 

The glasses could give them all the information they needed.
“Because he was afraid of being found out by the advanced technology, he confessed,” said Mr. Shan, adding that the suspect had swallowed 60 small packs of heroin.
“We didn’t even use any interrogation techniques,” Mr. Shan said. 

“He simply gave it all up.”