Lizzie O’Leary, host of What Next:TBD, spoke with Josh Chin about Xi Jinping’s high-tech surveillance state and some American companies that helped get him there.
There are around 400 million surveillance cameras installed in China – one for every three or four citizens, he said.
Although Chin doesn’t criticise the Chinese surveillance state as we would and at times seems to think of it in a positive light, what he says gives insight into how our lives would be if we allow our governments to follow the same ideology. In other words, what life would be like living in a society run by technocrats.
However, we haven’t listened to the interview instead; we based our article on O’Leary’s write-up of it. It could be, for the sake of brevity or other reasons, O’Leary omitted comments in her write-up that were overly critical, just as we have been selective of what to include. You can listen to the 40-minute What Next: TBD episode titled ‘Big Brother, Big Tech and China’ HERE and read the full article published by Slate HERE.
Josh Chin is the deputy bureau chief for China for the Wall Street Journal. He has covered China for more than a decade. Chin and his colleague, Liza Lin, have recently written a book about the rise of China’s surveillance state and how Xi Jinping has used high-tech surveillance to consolidate his power.
In 2017, Chin visited Xinjiang province, home to China’s ethnic Uyghur minority. “When we got there,” Chin said, “it was like just driving into a dystopian counterinsurgency war zone where essentially everywhere you went, you were encountering cutting-edge, AI-driven technology – surveillance cameras, microphones.” Uyghurs were the targets of the surveillance, he said:
“If you were a Uyghur, what they were telling us is you would go outside and from the minute you left your door, you were being tracked. There were security checkpoints everywhere, every public place. If you wanted to go into a bank or a hotel or a market, anything like that, you had to go through a security checkpoint. You had to scan your ID card and also scan your face to match it with your ID card, and so they would have a record of where you were going. Walking down the street, police could wave you over and make you hand over your phone and they would plug it into a scanning device and they would scan your phone for some digital contraband.”
The Chinese state took this data and slotted people into one of three categories: safe, average, and unsafe. “People who were unsafe were disappearing and they were being sent to what the government described as schools, but when we went to go visit them, we visited one and it was essentially a prison,” Chin said.
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