[It is also a vision that some of President Trump’s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. Beyond concerns about market barriers, theft and national security, they argue that China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad — and that the United States must stop it.]
By
Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur
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President Xi Jinping of
China looming large on a screen in Kashgar, in the Xinjiang
region. As many as one
million members of Muslim ethnic minorities are held
in internment camps in
Xinjiang. Credit Ng Han Guan/Associated Press
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KASHGAR,
China — A God’s-eye view of
Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen,
with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of
recent security incidents. At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the
police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer
look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.
To demonstrate, she showed how the system
could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a
woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. The system
sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education,
family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an
internet cafe.
The simulation, presented at an industry fair
in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every
corner of Xinjiang, the troubled region where Kashgar is located.
This is the vision of high-tech surveillance
— precise, all-seeing, infallible — that China’s leaders are investing billions
of dollars in every year, making Xinjiang an incubator for increasingly
intrusive policing systems that could spread across the country and beyond.
It is also a vision that some of President
Trump’s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese
companies in the intensifying trade war. Beyond concerns about market barriers,
theft and national security, they argue that China is using technology to
strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad — and that the United States
must stop it.
Developed and sold by the China Electronics
Technology Corporation, a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar
is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for
technology that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of
Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang.
Treating a city like a battlefield, the
platform was designed to “apply the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian
public security,” Wang Pengda, a C.E.T.C. engineer, said in an official blog
post. “Looking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time.”
The system taps into networks of neighborhood
informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate
potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces
to deploy, the company said.
On the screen during the demonstration was a
slogan: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections,
there will be information.”
A New York Times investigation drawing on
government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders
found that China is in effect hard-wiring Xinjiang for segregated surveillance,
using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to
monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han
Chinese, who make up 36 percent of Xinjiang’s population.
It is a virtual cage that complements the
indoctrination camps in Xinjiang where the authorities have detained a million
or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular
citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. The program helps
identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them
when they are released.
The Trump administration is considering
whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the Xinjiang
effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying American technology. Hikvision is a
major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the
world and across Xinjiang, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and
detention camps. C.E.T.C. owns about 42 percent of the company through
subsidiaries.
“Xinjiang is maybe a kind of more extreme,
more intrusive example of China’s mass surveillance systems,” said Maya Wang, a
China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the
region. “These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose — to target
Muslims.”
[The Times’s Privacy Project explores the surveillance technology used by companies and governments, and where it’s taking us.]
Virtual
fences
In the city of Kashgar, with a population of
720,000 — about 85 percent of them Uighur — the C.E.T.C. platform draws on
databases with 68 billion records, including those on people’s movements and
activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the
industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.
By comparison, the F.B.I.’s national instant
criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end
of 2018.
The police in Xinjiang use a mobile app, made
by C.E.T.C. for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter
information into the databases.
Human Rights Watch, which obtained and
analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they
consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an
“unusual” amount of electricity.
The app, which the Times examined, also
allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a
smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going
from home, or have refueled someone else’s car.
The police use the app at checkpoints that
serve as virtual “fences” across Xinjiang. If someone is tagged as a potential
threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to
leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.
“The government’s arbitrary power is
reflected, or coded, in the app,” Ms. Wang said, adding that the system “is
programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them
perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness.”
Intelligence agencies in many countries use
sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. But China has
taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in Xinjiang
as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms,
including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.
The Chinese government has defended the
surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says
the indoctrination camps in Xinjiang are job training centers. Hikvision has
denied “any inappropriate actions in Xinjiang,” and C.E.T.C. declined to
comment when reached by phone.
C.E.T.C. traces its roots to the military research
labs that helped build China’s first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided
missile. Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded
into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create
a version of Windows that meets the government’s internal security
requirements.
In recent years, it turned to Xinjiang.
The Communist Party, which took control of
the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and
Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on
Chinese targets. State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after
anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.
The real bonanza of security contracts came
after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal
security in Xinjiang totaled nearly $8.4 billion in 2017, six times as much as
in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the indoctrination
camps.
Hikvision has received contracts in Xinjiang
worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems.
Another company tapping into Xinjiang’s security gold rush is Huawei, the
Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. It
signed an agreement last year with the region’s police department to help
officers analyze data.
‘The
goal here is instilling fear’
The multilayered program to harvest
information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and
cities across Xinjiang in buildings that look like toll plazas.
Instead of coins, they collect personal
information.
On a recent visit to one checkpoint in
Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their
vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by C.E.T.C. and swiped their
identity cards.
“Head up,” the machines chimed as they
photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.
There are smaller checkpoints at banks,
parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from
identity cards in the mass surveillance database.
Identification cards are also needed to buy
knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. The purchases are entered
into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals,
according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.
Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience.
At many checkpoints, privileged groups — Han Chinese, Uighur officials with
passes, and foreign visitors — are waved through “green channels.” In this way,
the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same
streets — and in the online police databases — one for Muslim minorities, the
other for Han Chinese.
“The goal here is instilling fear — fear that
their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,” said
Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about Xinjiang as well as
China’s surveillance state. “The amount of people and equipment used for
security is part of the deterrent effect.”
A database stored online by SenseNets, a
Chinese surveillance company, and examined by the Times suggests the scale of
surveillance in Xinjiang: It contained facial recognition records and ID scans
for about 2.5 million people, mostly in Urumqi, a city with a population of
about 3.5 million.
“This can be pulled off by anyone, and that’s
the part that worries me,” said Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher and
co-founder of GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes internet security.
According to Mr. Gevers, who discovered the
unsecured database, the online records indicate that a network of about 10,000
checkpoints in Urumqi made more than six million identifications in 24 hours.
The authorities in Xinjiang also sometimes
force residents to install an app known as “Clean Net Guard” on their phones to
monitor for content that the government deems suspicious.
Kashgar and other areas of Xinjiang have in
recent years systematically collected DNA and other biological data from
residents too, especially Muslims. Officials now collect blood, fingerprints,
voice recordings, head portraits from multiple angles, and scans of irises,
which can provide a unique identifier like fingerprints.
These databases are not yet completely
integrated, and despite the futuristic gloss of the Xinjiang surveillance
state, the authorities rely on hundreds of thousands of police officers,
officials and neighborhood monitors to gather and enter data.
“We risk understating the extent to which
this high-tech police state continues to require a lot of manpower,” said
Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has studied security spending in
Xinjiang. “It is the combination of manpower and technology that makes the 21st-century
police state so powerful.”
Expanding
beyond the region
Xinjiang’s security and surveillance systems
are already attracting admirers from the rest of China. Delegations of police
officers from other provinces and cities have visited Kashgar and other cities
to admire — and consider adopting — the measures.
They often visit police command centers where
rows of officers peer at computers, scanning surveillance video feeds and
information on residents on the C.E.T.C. platform.
“The digitalization of police work has
achieved leap-like growth in Xinjiang,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer
from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China, said during a visit to Xinjiang
last year, according to an official report on the website of the city’s police bureau.
Xinjiang’s high-tech policing, he added, was
“something we should vigorously study.”
Zhejiang and Guangdong, two wealthy provinces
on China’s southeastern coast, have been testing the C.E.T.C. surveillance
system used in Xinjiang, “laying a robust foundation for a nationwide rollout,”
the company said last year.
C.E.T.C. has also signed an agreement with
the police in the southern city of Shenzhen to provide an advanced “command
center information system” similar to the one in Xinjiang.
The technology has some way to go. Dust and
bad lighting can hobble facial recognition on security cameras, which struggle
to track large numbers of people simultaneously. Even the best systems can be
accurate in less than 20 percent of cases, according to one study published by
a journal linked to the Ministry of Public Security.
A technician who until recently installed and
maintained computers for the authorities in Xinjiang said police surveillance
centers relied on hundreds of workers to monitor cameras, an expensive and
inefficient undertaking.
And outside urban centers, police officers
often do not have the skills to operate the sophisticated systems, said the
technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions for
speaking to a journalist.
The spending spree on security in Xinjiang
has left local governments across the region with staggering bills, raising
questions about how the authorities can keep the systems running.
In Kashgar, for example, the county of
Yengisar warned this year of a “huge shortfall” from spending on security and
said that it had accumulated 1 billion renminbi, or about $150 million, in
previously undeclared “invisible debt.”
“The pressure from ensuring basic spending
for additional staff and to maintain stability is extraordinary,” it said.
Still, the region’s leaders told officials
this year that they must not wind back spending.
“Preserving stability is a hard-and-fast task
that takes priority over everything else,” the leadership said in the region’s
annual budget report. “Use every possible means to find funds so that the
high-pressure offensive does not let up.”
Austin Ramzy contributed reporting from Hong
Kong, and Aaron Krolik from New York.
