This report
just in from The New York Times
In 2009, after internet-fueled race riots between Uighur Muslims and Han
Chinese in China’s northwest territory of Xinjiang, the ruling Communist Party
took drastic action: the digital kill switch. Beijing disabled Xinjiang’s internet, sending
military police to restore order. The blackout lasted nearly a year. Now, a
decade later, Xinjiang is writhing under a new clampdown aimed at the Uighurs.
This time, Beijing has embraced the opposite philosophy: a digital panopticon, enlisting private tech
firms to expand China’s internet of things and enmesh its own people.
The technologies being honed in Xinjiang, driven by this kind of
illiberal innovation, may be coming soon to an app store near you.
These exports risk enabling aspiring autocrats worldwide, and may concentrate alarming power in the hands of China’s Communist Party.
Until recently, China
was dismissed as an innovation laggard that
copied technology from the West. Today, many Chinese tech sectors have leapfrogged Silicon Valley, sometimes
with heavy-handed helpfrom the party. Consumer-friendly
smartphone apps have pushed cash, credit cards and identification documents
toward extinction. Hotel booking systems will ping your smartphone, linked to
your national ID card, to let you check in using facial recognition. In under a minute, a
mom-and-pop hardware kiosk can create a personalized QR code forcashless payments through WeChat, an
indispensable app that combines the functions of WhatsApp,
Venmo, Seamless, Uber and more. For an expatriate accustomed to China’s freewheeling start-up scene and whizzy tech conveniences, coming home can feel
like stepping back in time.
But, as the Uighur minority
of Xinjiang are learning, that convenience comes at an
Orwellian price. Speedy data networks and integrated digital commerce are
learning to work with the party’s aggressive security apparatus. Invasive DNA databases and facial recognitionpowered by artificial
intelligence have created a digital dragnet, enhanced by mandatory surveillance
apps installed on smartphones and backed by a newly built network of IRL gulags. Offenses as
trivial as forwarding a traditional Islamic holiday greeting on WeChat, or
posting a bearded selfie, can land citizens in
internment camps. Even Uighurs living abroad are entangled, through their families and their
smartphones, in Beijing’s crackdown. (The repression has reportedly created a
black market in old Nokia phones, which are less legible to the state.)
Xinjiang’s plight is more
than a local tragedy: It is a warning.
The global risk from China’s technology sector
is not necessarily a sinister conspiracy to exert Xinjiang-style controls
overseas. Beijing’s leaders are focused on domestic affairs and for now, China’s
budding tech dystopia is still more “Brazil” than “Black
Mirror.” Rather, this risk is a byproduct of Beijing’s business as
usual, on a huge global scale.
Products created for China’s vast surveilled and censored domestic market are
increasingly popular overseas, where they are often cheaper and more appealing
to consumers. Huawei, for instance, has honed its 5G
wireless technology — which will support the next generation of data-intensive,
A.I.-powered gadgets — in China’s domestic, bleeding-edge consumer market for
the internet of things. Many Huawei phones are bought by Chinese who have never
owned a PC or other digital device, giving the company an edge in imagining and
designing mobile products for developing markets that skipped over the PC era.
Huawei’s cheaper (and often subsidized) price points, and comparable or
superior products, have made its phones a better-value purchase than the iPhone
for cost-savvy consumers around the world, and its 5G infrastructure attractive
for penny-pinching governments. Most are unaware, or apparently unconcerned,
about censorship or surveillance.
2013201520172019productionshare0%15%30%Source:
Yearly data from TrendForce. 2019 data is
projected.SamsungAppleHuaweiXiaomivivoOPPOHuawei is expected tomake more
smartphonesthan Apple in 2019OtherAmericanChinese
They should be worried. According to the Soviet-style playbook that still
influences Chinese security services, collecting haystacks of citizen information, by whatever means
necessary, is the foundation of social control and “stability maintenance.”
The Soviet model was an analog blend of Big
Brother and big data, amassing reams of information about citizens to
understand their fears, vulnerabilities and intentions, and pre-empt any
challenge to the Party-State’s power. China has adapted this paranoid style to the modern
tech age. Private corporations and the Communist Party’s security apparatus
have grown together, discovering how the samedata sets can both cater to consumers and help commissars calibrate repression.
The party’s instinctual contempt for privacy,
married to its proactive industrial policy, can be a boon for well-connected
private businesses. Many tech firms make a point of hiring the relatives of
high party officials, and a vast state database of headshots might be shared with a private firm to
train new facial recognition software, while the firm’s trove of real-time user
data might be offered to police, for a panoramic view of potential
“troublemakers.”
Between the Communist Party’s repressive
impulses, its influence over China’s vast and innovative tech ecosystem, and
new technology’s general propensity to disrupt and surprise, it is naïve to
expect that we can fully anticipate and mitigate the impact of illiberal
innovations exported abroad. Even innocuous-seeming technology, when paired
with China’s authoritarian impulses and state-led development model, may
challenge liberal values in unexpected ways.
Consider TikTok, a social video-sharing app
that last year had more downloads on the Apple app store than Instagram. TikTok
fills a market niche abandoned by Vine, the American-grown short-video-sharing
app shuttered by Twitter in 2017. Users can upload videos of themselves or
friends lip-synching the latest pop tunes or decorating or distorting their faces,
all easily edited into a clip for other users to “like,” “share” or comment on.
To China’s surveillance state, a video-sharing
app offers much more than than your dog dancing to Drake. TikTok’s domestic
Chinese version, Douyin, is heavily censored and surveilled: Last year, the
British cartoon Peppa Pig was purged from the platform
after the authorities decided she had taken on subversive meaning. (It is
unclear whether this was because of a direct government order or the company
pre-emptively censoring itself.)
For residents of Xinjiang, posting a video of
traditional Uighur music sung in their native language might be flagged by
machine-learning algorithms, and bring a deletion and a visit from the police.
In what appear to be precautionary performances of loyalty to the government,
Uighur users of Douyin have recorded themselves singing pro-party songs,
pointedly in Mandarin. Given the wide use of facial recognition across
Xinjiang, and the potential sharing of security data sets between state
agencies and private firms, Douyin’s raw video data may also offer a tempting
training set for machine-learning software. (Recent leaks have shown China’s developing
capability to match GPS coordinates with Uighur facial recognition data; with
help from a Yale professor and an American biotech firm, Thermo Fisher, China
has also built a database of Uighur DNA.)
To date, no evidence suggests that Chinese
authorities have used their leverage over Douyin domestically to censor or
surveil TikTok overseas. But given what we know about Beijing’s illiberal
impulses, there is a gap between what is provable beforehand, and what it is
prudent to presume. The brazen lying that is normalized in China’s corporate
and political culture, and the meaninglessness of written rules, mean that
published regulations, or guarantees by private firmsand government officials, are simply not credible.
(Just ask Prof. Kenneth Kidd, the geneticist at Yale who
accepted assurances from his Chinese counterparts that DNA samples for their
joint project would be ethically obtained. Dr. Kidd claimed to be shocked
— shocked — to discover that the Ministry of Public Security’s
sweet nothings can’t be taken at face value. His credulous negligence has
tainted a Yale DNA database; future generations may remember
Thermo Fischer among corporate collaborationists like I.B.M. and Bayer.)
TikTok itself has already been fined by the Federal Trade Commission for
a casual attitude toward privacy compliance; its heavy-handed solution, mass
deletions, enraged some consumers. But the choices of
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, are rational; it fears the Communist Party
more than angry tweets from tweens outside the Great Firewall.
The West’s increasing technological and
economic exposure to China may have unintended consequences. Over a decade ago,
the singer Björk was banned from China, and muzzled within the Great Firewall,
for advocating Tibetan independence during a concert in Shanghai. If, tomorrow,
Björk followed up with a TikTok video pleading for Uighur rights, and the clip
went viral globally, would the party be able to resist the temptation to lean
on ByteDance to slow or stop it? If your face appears in the background of
another person’s TikTok video shot in Berlin, will it be logged using facial
recognition software running in Shanghai? Those who complain that American
firms like Facebook are invasive and unaccountable are unlikely
to prefer China’s tech giants, which are often cowed by, and collaborating
with, the Party-State’s opaque and irascible censorship and surveillance apparatus.
[As technology advances,
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explore what’s at stake and what you can do about it.]
To be sure, the United States has abused its
own technological hegemony for power and profit. After World War II, much
global communications infrastructure ran through wires on United States soil,
giving American spies privileged access to the world’s
communications. American intelligence agencies have been credibly accused of seeding United
States-made electronic exports with bugs and spyware.
The critical difference with China lies not in
the wiring of chips or lines of code, but in history, culture and scale. By
custom, Americans trust that the contents of their snail-mail letters are
protected by the Fourth Amendment; government access requires a judge to issue
a warrant. American tech firms routinely stand up to the United States
government. Apple, for example, has developed default iOS encryptions that shield user
activity from the company itself, to the frustration of the F.B.I. An iPhone user in
Iran or Belarus benefits from Silicon Valley’s civil libertarianism.
China is different. The People’s Republic has
always reserved the right to open its citizens’ mail at any time, for any
reason; there is no basis to believe its basic approach will differ because the
technology is new. Ironically, the internet, which Western techno-utopians
prophesied would liberalize China, may instead allow the party to indulge previously impossible fantasies of mass
control. The Uighurs of Xinjiang are the first in human history to fully
experience the downside of China’s illiberal innovation. They are unlikely to
be the last.
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