THE DRAGON THAT STALKS THE WEST As democracies look the other way, China is exporting the surveillance, censorship, social control and genocide it perpetrates within its own borders BY ED MCK I N L EY
An activity as mundane as an English class can arouse the suspicion of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That’s why the authorities routinely show up in classrooms to check students’ ID cards. Almost invariably, nothing’s amiss—but on a recent school visit police encountered something unexpected. An American researcher was sitting in on the lesson. The American feared the worst when he realized he’d left his passport at the hotel. But not to worry—a Chinese police officer already had the situation under control. He punched the foreign visitor’s name into a handheld device that immediately displayed his passport number, hotel reservation and who knows what other private, personal, sensitive information. It wasn’t an isolated incident. The People’s Republic of China is spinning a spider’s web of surveillance, censorship and authoritarianism to monitor and control a growing portion of its citizenry and its guests from other nations. The horror doesn’t stop at the borders because the CCP and its puppet corporations are exporting those evils to other dictatorships and even to democracies. It amounts to an undeclared cold war.
cameras, facial recognition, DNA samples, voice recognition and artificial intelligence. The CCP is using that integrated arsenal of low- and high-tech tools to reign in the freedom of a growing list of groups in China, says Sarah Cook, a senior research analyst at Freedom House, a New Yorkbased democracy watchdog. After the suppression of Uyghurs came the harassment of suspected drug addicts, former criminals, banned religious groups—such as Christians and Buddhists—and foreigners of every stripe, Cook notes. Compiling a DNA database of minority groups amounts to a latter-day version of the punch cards the Nazis used to track Jews in Germany, according to Sophal Ear, professor of diplomacy and world affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles. For him, the injustice minorities suffer in China brings to
PHOTOGRAPH: REUTERS/STRINGER
CHINA’S STEALTH WAR
Surveillance cameras, like these near the headquarters of China’s Hikvision, are monitoring residents of countries across the globe.
Asserting more authority Arguably, China’s current push toward perfecting totalitarianism turned more serious in 2017 with the suppression of the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority targeted for assimilation into mainstream China. (See page 22.) The Uyghurs live under nearly constant scrutiny by the CCP, whose operatives employ long-established tools of social control, such as ID cards, checkpoints, interrogation, resettlement, torture, rape and murder. They combine those time-tested means of coercion with newer methods of intrusion that rely on video
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