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

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

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

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

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

I wish he had been right. 

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the party’s idea.

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

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

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

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

But it isn’t the same. 

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

There are multiple inputs. 

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

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

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

This applies to companies and individuals. 

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

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

Social credit is technology augmenting existing control methods. 

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

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

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

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

But privacy stops where the party’s power begins. 

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

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

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

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

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

And control happens for convenience. 

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

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

It’s a virtual police state. 

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

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

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

A lot of people don’t believe Western reporting. 

If they see it. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One agreement was made with Turkish mobile provider Turkcell. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its intent relates to state security. 

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

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

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

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

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

Even understanding advertising and consumer preferences can feed into propaganda. 

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

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

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

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

They take advantage of our really weak data privacy laws. 

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

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

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

Die Endlösung der Uigurischefrage

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

By Sherisse Pham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China's Final Solution

China is inventing a whole new way to oppress a people
By Benny Avni

The growing, horrifying oppression of Muslims in a western Chinese colony marks a key moment in Beijing’s expansionist drive — and its global competition with America.
A key part of China’s manufacturing machine, East Turkestan colony is a gateway to Central Asia, and therefore crucial for Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, a plan to create a formidable China-dominated realm all the way to the Indian Ocean and the Mideast.
The province’s 11 million Uighurs look different than most Chinese, have a different culture, practice moderate Islam — and have been oppressed by Beijing for decades. 

But now, seen as a major stumbling block to Xi’s new ambitions, China’s Communist Party has escalated its control.
Things worsened when Xi became president in 2012. 

But the real turning point was in 2016, when the Communist Party secretary in Tibet, Chen Quanguo, was transferred to East Turkestan, importing to the colony tactics used in his successful quashing of Tibetan unrest.
In East Turkestan, Beijing is honing to perfection such tactics as facial recognition, personal-background data-mining and DNA collection. 

Scannable codes are posted on apartment buildings where suspected Uighur dissidents live. 

Such practices, reminiscent of 1940s low-tech identification of Jewish residences under German control, may expand beyond the Uighur province.
“Now they [have started] using these systems in the rest of China,” says Omer Kanat, director of the Washington, DC-based Uyghur Human Rights Project. 

Soon, he added, the tactics China uses in East Turkestan will be exported to friendly dictatorships outside the country as well.
Up to 1 million Uighurs were sent to concentration camps for “sins” like eating Halal food or growing beards longer than Beijing allows. 

Those interned in camps are forced to eat pork, study Xi’s writing and participate in intensive forced-labor projects. 

Some are executed; many don’t survive for other reasons.
Artists, scholars, musicians, intellectuals and anyone who ever had contact with the outside world are specifically targeted for “cultural indoctrination,” Kanat adds. 

“My neighbor, Abdel Rashid Seley, died in the camp.” 

Other reported Uighur deaths include an intellectual known for his translation of the Koran to Chinese and one of China’s most well-known scientists.
After taking over Macao and Hong Kong, Beijing promised to leave local practices intact, calling it “one government, two systems.” 

But by now China’s neighbors know that once Beijing assumes control, it’ll pursue complete ideological, political and cultural domination. 

If you happen to be Muslim, Christian, Falun Dafa or a Western-style democrat — well, too bad.
Xi increasingly uses China’s economic prowess to squeeze resistant neighbors and reward those willing to accept Beijing’s dominance. 

Once successful, China will control regions rich in minerals, rare earths, oil and other resources necessary for China’s economic growth.
Beijing will also export its model of controlled capitalism, using economic incentives and punishment as well as military tactics honed in the East and South China Seas.
But to pave his new Silk Road, Xi must first control China’s gateway to Central Asia. 

And if America wants to arrest his march, highlighting Uighur oppression would be a good start.
To that end, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have already been speaking up. 

Some in Congress call to invoke the Magnitsky Act and impose sanctions on seven Chinese officials responsible for the Uighur plight, including party secretary Chen.
The administration’s wild card: Donald Trump, who veers between expressing his friendship with Xi and waging a trade war against China. 

A more comprehensive strategy is needed.
Xi’s China is emerging as America’s most formidable global enemy since the end of the so-called “end of history” era. 

Many countries in China’s immediate neighborhood, and increasingly beyond, face a choice: our liberal democracy or China’s harsh ways.
America should highlight the horrors suffered by China’s Uighurs to help those countries choose right. 

Oh yeah: We also bear an obligation to stand up for universally accepted human rights, and the Uighurs are also a model pro-American Muslim community.
Some of China’s allies will rejoice as they study Beijing’s new ways to control populations. 

Everyone else represents our current, and perhaps future, allies.

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.”

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.