ROBERT WILLIAMS
For years, in the name of environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, safety and convenience, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), led by Klaus Schwab, have been promoting global surveillance in the form of so-called "smart cities." In China, already by 2018, there were more than 500 smart cities in place.
During Covid-19, the UN and the WEF came up with a slogan: "Build back better" - recycled by then US President Joe Biden. Countless national leaders, like little programmed UN/WEF bots, endlessly repeated the slogan, while most unsuspecting citizens had no idea what it meant.
National leaders began thanking the Covid-19 pandemic for offering a once-in-a-lifetime "opportunity to build back better" from the destruction that their very own Covid-19 policies - notably the lockdowns - had wrought. Biden introduced a trillion dollar Build Back Better Plan, having as one of its highest priorities, "the fight against climate change," through building "smart infrastructure."
The WEF, far from hiding its communist aspirations, argued in a paper that capitalism itself would have to be "reinvented." As is common knowledge, Schwab appears to be a great admirer of the Chinese Communist state, which he praised in 2022 as a "model" to emulate. "I think we should be very careful in imposing systems. But the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries," Schwab said on Chinese state television.
The way to "build back better", according to the UN and the WEF, is to establish "smart cities"
"More than 90 per cent of COVID-19 cases have been occurring in urban areas that have become the epicenter of the pandemic... Now is our chance to recover better, by building more resilient, inclusive and sustainable cities. Innovations and technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) or artificial intelligence (AI) provide the possibility of upgrading urban services and achieving greater administrative efficiency. The concept of 'smart cities', which can help stimulate inclusive growth, promote social inclusion, decrease traffic congestion, combat crimes, improve resilience during natural disasters and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has a potential as a solution to urban problems both in developing and developed countries."
Schwab likened "climate change" to Covid 19, even calling it a "virus" in December 2024:
"So is an awareness now, generally, it's generally accepted that, climate change, if we do not tackle it, could be the next big, let's say virus, with much more damaging and long term consequences, compared to COVID 19."
On paper, the smart city is usually promoted as a techno-utopian blessing. National Geographic, in a text for children, defines it this way:
"A smart city, then, is a city in which a suite of sensors (typically hundreds or thousands) is deployed to collect electronic data from and about people and infrastructure so as to improve efficiency and quality of life. Residents and city workers, in turn, may be provided with apps that allow them to access city services, receive and issue reports of outages, accidents, and crimes, pay taxes, fees, and the like. In the smart city, energy efficiency and sustainability are emphasized."
In reality, the purpose of the smart city, as seen by its widespread use in China, has little to do with improving quality of life. Instead, it is overwhelmingly about state surveillance, followed by total monitoring and control of the inhabitants and the uninhibited extraction of their data for its system of social credits. According to MIT Technology Review:
"The government seems to believe that all these problems are loosely tied to a lack of trust, and that building trust requires a one-size-fits-all solution. So just as financial credit scoring helps assess a person's creditworthiness, it thinks, some form of 'social credit' can help people assess others' trustworthiness in other respects."
National Geographic's propaganda about the benefits of smart cities spookily echoes how Chinese Communists promoted the smart city when it was still in its infancy. Mayor Chen Xinfa of Karamay, a city in Xinjiang, said in 2012:
"Information technology is not just about technology. It should be integrated with all aspects of life in our city and make people's lives more convenient. The 'smart city' could also alert city leaders like me to what needs to be done urgently regarding city management or emergencies. For Karamay, it's not the future, but what's happening now,"
Xinjiang is an "autonomous region" in China where ethnic Uyghurs were among the first in the country to be monitored with surveillance and facial recognition technology 24/7.
Smart cities, in fact, are a Chinese Communist idea, established by the Chinese government in its 12th Five-Year Plan, issued in 2011.
In China, smart cities have been purposely developed into terrifying tyrannical nightmares. In many cities, including Shanghai and Hangzhou, every district has a data-hub, known as a so-called "City Brain," that monitors and stores unbelievable amounts of information about all citizens.
The data is gathered by millions and millions of surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, aided by artificial intelligence. They all feed in the smallest details, such as whether a construction worker is wearing his helmet on the job, wrongful disposal of garbage and other minute offenses. Police patrols access the monitoring systems through a mobile app, to enable them to act immediately against any offenses of the law.
This same "smart" system is being advanced everywhere in China. According to Deutsche Welle, "Chinese state media boasts that police can identify every single person on the street in just one second." Chinese citizens are monitored throughout every step of their daily lives, even when entering their own apartment buildings: During lockdowns, police could immediately respond to anyone who dared defy the prohibition against going outdoors.
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