This article from the Associated Press is worth a read if you have the time. There are really two stories being told. One is about an unfortunate family in China who had their land stolen from them and who suffered the worst a police state can dish out in response to their efforts to seek justice.
In April [2009], local authorities ordered the Yangs and more than 300 other families in their village off their land. Developers coveted their prime lakefront property for “Western-style” apartments and villas, with fountains, football fields and shopping centers...
The Yangs and other farmers across China filed complaints.
“I discovered the way the government took our land was illegal,” Yang Caiying said. “They cheated us.”...
Furious, the Yangs sued local police. In June 2015, a judge ruled their land had been seized illegally. The Yangs celebrated.
The other story told in the piece is about how US companies sold China the technology that became central to their police state. It would be bad enough if the US companies selling this tech were unaware of what it would be used for but documents suggest they knew exactly what it would be used for. In fact, their own marketing materials made an effort to echo some of China's own autocratic catchphrases, i.e. "stability maintenance."
...the AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield” for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome, according to thousands of pages of classified government blueprints taken out of China by a whistleblower, verified by AP and revealed here for the first time. IBM and other companies that responded said they fully complied with all laws, sanctions and U.S. export controls governing business in China, past and present...
Though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate show. Their sales pitches — made both publicly and privately — cited Communist Party catchphrases on crushing protest, including “stability maintenance,” “key persons,” and “abnormal gatherings,” and named programs that stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes” and the “Golden Shield.”...
Researchers warned surveillance technologies would be “instruments of repression” in the hands of authoritarian states. Yet IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and other American companies clinched orders to supply Beijing’s “Golden Shield.”...
Classified government blueprints obtained by AP show that in 2009, IBM worked with Huadi, the state-owned subsidiary of China’s biggest missile military contractor spun off from China’s Ministry of Defense, to build out predictive policing.
“Consolidate Communist Party rule,” read the Huadi blueprint, which showed the databases would track hundreds of thousands of people online.
In response to AP’s questions, IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”
But as you've probably guessed, the Yang family got a first hand experience with this US tech and did not find it to be old or stale.
But just weeks after the ruling, officers identified human rights lawyers through the “Golden Shield” technology, cuffed hundreds of them and pressed them into police vans across China. One lawyer later recalled how police monitored his messages on human rights in WeChat before they grabbed him, shackled him to a chair, and tortured him.
Overnight, China’s budding rights-defense movement was dealt a fatal blow — and with it, the Yangs’ case. The Yangs were called in and curtly told the judgment was being overturned, their lawsuit dismissed without trial.
Meanwhile, the Yangs were branded troublemakers and surveillance went from being outside their home to being inside it 24/7. They are just one example of a much wider trend.
Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state — a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison...
“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said, sitting behind black curtains that block him from the glare of police lights trained straight at his house. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”
Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.
It's depressing to learn that US companies really do behave like the fictional corporations in some of James Cameron's movies. Weyland-Yutani comes to mind. There's an old story that Lenin or maybe Stalin once said "the capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with." It's not true. Neither of them ever said that so far as anyone can prove, but that quote (fictional or not) does seem disturbingly close to what this story depicts.
In their defense, a lot of this surveillance tech made its way to China prior to 2019 when it was still common for Americans to believe China would eventually move toward democracy if we engaged in free trade. The crackdown on Hong Kong, the jailing of hundreds of thousands of people in Xinjiang and the ongoing mystery over the origins of Covid have cured most of us of that delusion. Still, it appears at least some of these companies knew at the time what China intended to do with this tech and they eagerly jumped to help build this high-tech police state.
The people involved ought to be named and shamed, or better yet, they could wind up in China having their own automated autocracy trained on them for a few years.
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