Reports and other media articles over the past month detail the ways in which the technology and norms underpinning China’s surveillance industry are proliferating in other countries around the world. This week, Emily Baker-White at Forbes published an investigation finding that Intel, which recently agreed to give the U.S. government a ten-percent stake in the company, has been working with sanctioned Chinese surveillance firms:
Forbes has learned that Intel has little known partnerships with multiple Chinese surveillance firms, including Uniview — which landed on a U.S. sanctions list last year “because it enables human rights violations, including high-technology surveillance targeted at the general population, Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” (Uniview has asked the U.S. to reconsider the sanctions.)
Intel’s Chinese-language site also includes documents referencing partnerships with Hikvision, a major surveillance camera manufacturer that has been hit with a barrage of sanctions in the last five years, and Cloudwalk, a facial recognition company which was sanctioned in 2021. Both companies have been accused by the U.S. government of allegedly enabling human rights abuses through surveillance of Uyghurs.
[…] The company’s website identifies Uniview as a “titanium member partner” (archived here), and promotes its “video connected all-in-one machine” (archived here), which it describes as a security camera setup that uses Intel technology to facilitate “image/object detection/recognition/classification” and “video surveillance and analysis.” The product’s coverage area, per the website, is the Chinese mainland, Macao and Hong Kong. The Intel website also touts Uniview’s “Smart City Solution,” (archived here) which uses Intel smart cameras and vision processors in its surveillance tech. Intel’s site says Uniview’s Smart City Solution is available in China, as well as most other markets around the world, including North America. [Source]
Earlier this month at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Jelena Jankovic and Reid Standish reported on leaked files that reveal the Serbian government’s secret expansion of Chinese-made surveillance technology:
Leaked documents show a Serbian IT company that has won Interior Ministry tenders buying new software and services from the Chinese tech giant Huawei.
One purchase order from March 2024 shows plans to expand Serbia’s eLTE system, the private citywide hotspot that links the surveillance equipment and software that forms Huawei’s Safe City project and allows it to operate.
Experts who reviewed the files for RFE/RL said items on the purchase order could support up to 3,500 additional cameras.
The software and services are also provided by Huawei at a substantial discount.
[…] The program aims to provide facial and license-plate recognition and other surveillance capabilities integrated into a unified, citywide system.
[…] The issue is particularly controversial because [biometric facial recognition] is not provided for under Serbian law. [Source]
Other articles highlighted the risks of the spread of these Chinese surveillance technologies and norms. Last month, Ausma Bernot wrote for the China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE) platform about how Hikvision and Dahua surveillance cameras, which now dominate international markets, are easily exploitable and often slow to receive security upgrades, putting individuals, enterprises, and governments at risk of targeted hacking. In the Lowy Institute’s blog The Interpreter, Monique Taylor analyzed how Chinese surveillance exports, in the form of commercial products, are also instruments of norm diffusion. They are both “difficult to replace and easy to repurpose. They lock governments into Chinese hardware, software, and servicing ecosystems,” and “reshape institutional practices and normalise constant monitoring.” Earlier in the summer, Megan K. Stack wrote in The New York Times about how the state’s widespread surveillance tools and centralization of citizens’ data that characterizes Chinese society is now increasingly appearing in the U.S.
One notable medium through which surveillance-related institutional practices are reshaped is China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI). In an article this month for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, Paul Nantulya described how the GSI aims to “[build] coalitions of actors that align with Chinese norms on international security and domestic law enforcement,” and how China’s exports of surveillance systems alongside the GSI prioritizes state actors over the private sector and civil society, thereby raising concerns about its impact on rights and governance. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Isaac B. Kardon, and Cameron Waltz at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also published a report this month analyzing how China’s growing internal security outreach via the GSI plays a crucial role in China’s foreign security policy. The authors assessed that China is using the GSI to “set worldwide standards around public security, and to disseminate China’s domestic practices and principles for law enforcement, surveillance, counterterrorism, and other vital internal security functions”:
Beijing assigns comparatively larger roles in its security concept to law enforcement, paramilitary, and secret police agencies that focus on internal security and political policing, and is relatively more inclined to use tools like high-tech surveillance that have been developed and refined for internal security and stability-maintenance purposes.
Under GSI, China is externalizing a national security concept that is particularly focused on regime security and non-traditional security threats, and that predominantly employs internal security forces, police, and surveillance technology in its quest for “prevention and control” (防控) of threats and risks to stability, from within and from without.
[…] GPSCFL [the Global Public Security Cooperation Forum (Lianyungang)] presents an opportunity for China to market its law enforcement technologies to foreign customers. During the 2024 forum, the Ministry of Public Security hosted what it referred to as the inaugural Public Security Tech Expo, which invited forty-five Chinese surveillance, forensics, and law enforcement technology companies to show their wares. GPSCFL is not the only such expo supported or hosted by [China’s Ministry of Public Security], but it provides an important opportunity to encourage participant countries to adopt China’s security platforms, to normalize China’s development of advanced surveillance and security technology and its use in policing, and to build international consensus around China’s preferred norms by proposing international standards for development and use of these technologies. Moreover, as China’s security technology firms have sought new sources of profit overseas, and industry leaders have expressed concern about price wars and consolidation at home, the expo serves as an opportunity to maintain alignment between China’s internal security apparatus and the firms it relies on to conduct many of its domestic missions. [Source]
Several academic articles touched on surveillance within China. The American Political Science Association previewed a panel on digital authoritarianism and surveillance at its upcoming annual meeting in September, and referenced a paper by Xu Xu comparing digital and in-person surveillance. APSA stated, “Xu finds that the former is less intrusive, making it more palatable to citizens. Digital surveillance discourages political participation while preserving interpersonal trust and regime legitimacy, enabling its rapid expansion without significant public resistance.” Dakeng Chen and Jing Vivian Zhan published an article in June in the Journal of Chinese Political Science that analyzed public reactions to escalating digital control in China, which found that “awareness of the state’s mass monitoring and targeted repression intentions significantly decreases public support, especially for more intrusive measures.” Earlier this year, the journal published another article analyzing trends in and motivations for public procurement contracts of video surveillance technology by local governments.
For more on this topic, see CDT’s Cloud Cover report on the procurement of Police Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) technology that is used to enhance state surveillance capacity; previous posts on the domestic and international expansion of Chinese surveillance tech; how AI is being leveraged for online surveillance; CDT’s Sharper Eyes coverage from 2019; and other coverage from CDT Chinese. Outside of CDT, Valentin Weber, an expert in Chinese surveillance, also announced a new Substack blog called China Technosphere that will begin on September 3.
