Surveillance States: China and the United States

Whether the US wishes to admit it or not, it is immersed in a critical competition with China that is both technological and political in nature.  China has already demonstrated that it can be the world’s manufacturing center for low-value products, has demonstrated competitiveness in high-value production, and has a plan (Made in China 2025) to become a leader, if not the leader, in major technology areas.  They have the leadership, power, and resources to make things happen.  Meanwhile, the US has no plan, no leadership, and few resources.  In the political arena, China has much to brag about concerning its economic and cultural accomplishments.  It wishes to compare the effectiveness of its political system to the flailing democracies of the US and Europe.  Most recently, the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated that it was capable of isolating and apparently subduing the disease.  Meanwhile, it can sit on the sidelines laughing at the struggles of the US and its leadership as they come as supplicants for the necessary protective equipment and other products they need from China.

John Lanchester provides an interesting look at this competition in an article in the London Review of Books titled Document Number Nine.  China’s leadership is still identified by the title Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but communism is a poor label for its system.  Lanchester provides perspective.

“There’s no off-the-shelf description for China’s political and economic system. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred term, but the s-word makes an odd fit with a country that is the world’s most important market for luxury goods, has the second largest number of billionaires, stages the world’s biggest one-day shopping event, ‘Singles’ Day’, and is home to the world’s biggest, fastest-expanding, spendiest, most materially aspirational middle class. Look at the UN’s Human Development Index: after seventy years of communist rule, China’s inequality figures are dramatically worse than those of the UK and even the US. Can we call that ‘socialism’?”

“It’s equally hard to claim China as a triumph of capitalism, given the completeness of state control over most areas of life and the extent of its open interventions in the national economy – capital controls, for instance, are a huge no-no in free-market economics, but are central to the way the CCP runs the biggest economy in the world. This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. Growth hasn’t slowed down since the global financial crisis – or, as those cheeky scamps at the CCP tend to call it, the Western financial crisis. While the developed world has been struggling with low to no growth, China has grown by more than six per cent a year and a further eighty million mainly rural citizens have been raised out of absolute poverty since 2012. There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history.”

Clearly, China is a country to be reckoned with.  Past US postures towards China have clung to the hope that involvement with the international community would lead to China behaving more like the other members of that community.  That has not happened.  In particular, it was assumed that the advent of the internet in China would lead necessarily to liberalization.  It has not.

“The ‘butchers of Beijing’, as Bill Clinton described them in 1992, would be swept away by history. The arrival of the internet made this inevitability seem even more inevitable. ‘Liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem,’ Clinton said. ‘We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China’.”

The thrust of Lanchester’s article is to demonstrate how China is using its IT prowess and the internet to gain even greater control over society and over political aspirations.

“Its position is the diametric opposite of the Western received wisdom that the internet is necessarily and in its essence a threat to the authoritarian state. The Chinese government favours the doctrine of ‘cyber-sovereignty’, in which countries have control over their own versions of the internet.”

In 2013 a document referred to as “Document Number Nine,” with the official title of “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere” was leaked.  Lanchester tells us the perpetrator received a seven-year jail sentence and is now under house arrest.

“Document Number Nine warned of ‘the following false ideological trends, positions and activities’: ‘promoting Western constitutional democracy’; ‘promoting “universal values”’; ‘promoting civil society’; ‘promoting neoliberalism’; ‘promoting the West’s idea of journalism, challenging China’s principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to party discipline’; ‘promoting historical nihilism’ (which means contradicting the party’s view of history); ‘questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics’. The paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the party.”

“It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies. The conclusion speaks of the need to ‘conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield’, and especially to ‘strengthen guidance of public opinion on the internet’ and ‘purify the environment of public opinion on the internet’.”

“Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it.”

The internet came late to China and grew slowly at first, but then exploded as technology, particularly smartphones, spread.  With over 800 million users, the internet has become a busy place.

“The biggest internet companies in China can be seen as knock-offs of American originals, though because China is so big, the Chinese versions are now in many cases larger than their US templates, and as they have grown they have added many distinctive features of their own. Baidu is Google, Alibaba is Amazon (they’re the ones behind ‘Singles’ Day’), Tencent is sort of Facebook plus Netflix…Sina Weibo, usually referred to just as Weibo, is Twitter, which has been blocked in China since 2009. The story of the Chinese internet pivots around Weibo, because it was that company that came closest to embodying the opening up of information that internet advocates see as the main transformational point of the technology.”

“Weibo launched in August 2009 and over the next few years was the site of an unprecedented new freedom for Chinese citizens. People used it to connect and communicate and, increasingly, to complain – about pollution, corruption and government scandals.”

The popularity of Weibo as a mechanism for inserting and spreading criticism of the administration throughout the nation could not be tolerated.  Rules would be installed that would not so much forbid complaining as forbid organizing.

“This​ was the context for Document Number Nine, and it was also the point at which the CCP launched its counterattack. First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other words, deleted overnight. Then a conference was called for ‘Big Vs’, people with well-followed verified accounts, analogous to Twitter’s blue tick. At the conference, the newly formed Cyberspace Administration of China reminded the assembled big shots about their ‘social responsibility’ to the ‘interests of the state’ and ‘core socialist values’. Two weeks later, on 23 August 2013, the prominent investor and Weibo activist Charles Xue was arrested. He turned up shortly afterwards in a Chinese Central Television interview from his prison cell, weeping and apologising for his irresponsibility and vanity.”

“Such TV interviews have become a staple feature of the CCP’s internet crackdown, helped by a new law, passed in September 2013, which threatens three years in prison to anyone who shares a rumour that ‘upsets social order’ and is shared five hundred times or clicked on five thousand times. For people with Weibo followings well into the millions, the law effectively banned the posting of anything even potentially controversial…Weibo continues to grow, mind you; it’s just that it’s now the usual entertainment news and celebrity bollocks.”

Besides the expected blocking of any news the party deemed unacceptable, they also developed a cadre of agents who were paid to post information to counter anything that might leak through.

“The party’s new focus on internet censorship was given its first big test by the Umbrella Protests in Hong Kong, which kicked off in September 2014 – the name comes from the fact that protesters used raised umbrellas to ward off tear gas. The protests drew almost no attention in mainland China, thanks to the blocking of news and messages from Hong Kong, and also thanks to the systematic use of counter-propaganda by a new ‘fifty-cent army’ of paid bloggers, trolls and subject-changers (‘fifty-cent’ because that’s the amount allegedly paid per helpful post).”

Censorship is not the main goal of China’s control of the internet.  It is intended to be part of a bigger system of surveillance that would allow the state to track and evaluate the actions of every individual in the country.  This kind of capability is useful in countering an epidemic, but the ultimate intention is to grade citizens according to the social usefulness of their behavior.  The state will provide the appropriate criteria for evaluation.

“Big data and artificial intelligence [AI] are the next big thing in computing. The party’s plans for it, as set out in the State Council’s ‘next generation artificial intelligence development plan’, published in 2017, are the most ambitious of any government in the world. (It’s noteworthy that this paper, which is fully as alarming as Document Number Nine, was freely published by a government press. The CCP is proud of what it has in mind.)”

“When it comes to AI the party really, really isn’t messing around. ‘The widespread use of AI in education, medical care, pensions, environmental protection, urban operations, judicial services and other fields will greatly improve the level of precision in public services, comprehensively enhancing the people’s quality of life.’ Oh, and by the way: ‘AI technologies can accurately sense, forecast, and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner ... which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.’ This is as pure a dream of a totalitarian state as there has ever been – a future in which the state knows everything and anticipates everything, acting on its citizens’ needs before the citizen is aware of having them. It is an autocratic fantasy, a posthumanist dream, hiding in the plain sight of a Chinese government white paper.”

As in the United States, the Chinese willingly give away enormous amounts of data about themselves by using social media.

“For the censorship and control of the Chinese internet, one of the most useful tools is the app WeChat, which is one of the wonders of the internet world. WeChat – a subsidiary of Tencent – is a chat app similar to WhatsApp, but it also incorporates China’s biggest system of payments. Hundreds of millions of people use WeChat to pay for stuff, do their banking, call minicabs, find movies, book appointments, order takeaways and, of course, to communicate with one another, via phone or text or social network. No more than five hundred people are allowed to take part in any one chat – you can communicate with your family and your mates, but not broadcast across the entire platform on a Weibo-like scale.”

“WeChat is WhatsApp plus Uber plus Deliveroo plus Facebook plus online banking, and it is also god’s greatest gift to the Chinese surveillance state, since the authorities have access to all this information.”

The ubiquity of surveillance cameras coupled now with facial recognition and artificial intelligence allows nearly limitless opportunities for intrusion into individuals’ lives.

“The arrival of AI has turned the hundreds of thousands of cameras in our cities from passive recording devices into a connected network offering real-time surveillance and supervision. Add facial recognition to this and we have something new. The cute, customer-friendly side of this is effortless check-in at Chinese airports: the passenger simply stands in front of a camera and is identified, her boarding pass printed, without any action on her part. The slightly less cute version comes, say, in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, where a machine in the toilet, designed to crack down on excessive use of loo paper, ‘releases 60 cm of paper per face’; you can get more paper but you either need to grow a new face or wait nine minutes. And then there are the uses which aren’t cute at all: a street crossing in Fujian where jaywalkers are identified and have their face, name and address appear on a video screen beside the road; a school in Hangzhou where facial recognition technology monitors students to see when they are bored or distracted (the scanners are also used to pay for food and borrow books from the library); a state surveillance network, Skynet (yes, that’s the same as the evil computer system in the Terminator movies), which is capable of identifying any one of China’s 1.4 billion citizens within a second. Skynet is part of what’s been called the ‘police cloud’, in which police gather and synthesise all the information they can: ‘medical histories, takeaway orders, courier deliveries, supermarket loyalty card numbers, methods of birth control, religious affiliations, online behaviour, flights and train journeys, GPS movement co-ordinates and biometric data, face, voice, fingerprints – plus the DNA of some forty million Chinese people’.”

“This progress in facial recognition and big data is all part of the other development in the Chinese digital world, the social credit system. This is a credit score analogous to those which are run in the West by credit reference agencies such as Experian and Equifax. The complete view of our lives and finances owned by these firms seems largely to escape attention in the West, but it hasn’t escaped the attention of the CCP, which has multiple trials running of social credit systems that build on and expand the existing Western model. The Chinese pilots look not at consumer creditworthiness but at social behaviour, with the criteria for desirable behaviour defined by the party.”

“Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA…you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs.”

Far from becoming more like the rest of the developed world, China is attempting to create a state that is totally new and frighteningly different.  Success will depend on its people being reprogrammed into more compliant citizens.  They are currently practicing this reprogramming initiative on the Uighurs in Xinjiang.  One can imagine China becoming an example for autocrats everywhere, with the software system becoming a product for export.

“The idea that prosperity and the internet would in themselves make the country turn towards democracy has been proved wrong. Instead, China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state. The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalisation is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behaviour, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.”

It is important that we appreciate what is occurring in China because the same technology exists in our country and it is being used for much the same purposes.  The difference is that the developers are private companies who are surveilling the population in hopes of making more money.  Lanchester uses Facebook as his example.

“Much if not all of the technology currently developed in China already exists in the West, in forms that are just as intrusive. The difference is that the technology is almost all in the hands of private companies. AI, big data, facial recognition: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and any number of smaller and emerging companies are deeply invested in these fields. Add what these companies know about you to the colossal amount of data held by the credit reference agencies, and we are as fully open to surveillance in the West as are the citizens of the People’s Republic.”

“There is a touch of bathos to this: the technologies which are being used in China to invent a new form of the totalitarian state are being exploited here to make us click on ads and buy stuff.”

“Do we want facial recognition technology to be in the hands of the least scrupulous technology giant? If we don’t, we’re too late – it already is. Facebook has changed its terms of service over ‘tagging’ people’s photos a couple of times, from opt-out to opt-in, but the gist is that it is too late: Facebook already owns your ‘faceprint’, the algorithmic representation of your face. How much do we think we can trust them with it? Put it like this: Facebook owns a patent on how to recognise patterns of friendship association through identifying the spots of dust on your phone camera – in other words, if two people had their photo taken by the same camera, then those two people probably know each other. That’s important to the company, because the ‘People You May Know’ feature is one of Facebook’s strongest drivers of growth and engagement. Facebook also owns a patent on a system that interprets people’s facial expressions as they walk around a shop looking at the merchandise, and another on a system that recognises shoppers’ faces and assigns them a ‘trust level’ derived from their Facebook profile. The trust level might unlock special deals, if it were positive, but if it were negative – who knows? Why on earth would we trust Facebook?”

If you are pleased that at least your government agencies are not generating all this information about you, you should realize that they don’t have to generate it, they merely have to sweep it up from the people who already have it.

And how high is your level of trust in your government at this point?