[The report focuses also on how digital surveillance is expanding to include the collection of DNA samples, fingerprints, voice samples and blood types — in particular from those in the western Xinjiang region, where the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a campaign to strip the minority of their language, culture and religion.]
By Shibani Mahtani
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A Senate report details how China has invested in technology that aids
authoritarianism, such as facial recognition software and other
surveillance methods. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)
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HONG KONG — China will write the rules of the Internet unless the United States and its allies counter Beijing's efforts at mass surveillance and censorship, according to a report released Tuesday by the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The report, which comes as the Trump administration considers a ban on Chinese-owned apps like the video-sharing app TikTok and after Britain barred Huawei from its 5G networks, underscores a growing shift in the Western world away from Chinese technology amid concerns about mounting privacy and security risks.
The House of Representatives on Monday voted to bar federal employees from downloading TikTok on their government-issued devices.
The “United States is now on the precipice of losing the future of the cyber domain to China,” said the report, commissioned by Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the most senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“If China continues to perfect the tools of digital authoritarianism and is able to effectively implement them both domestically and abroad, then China, not the United States and its allies, will shape the digital environment,” the report added.
The report details how China has sought to “create a new model of governance for the digital domain,” through mass surveillance technology and controlling access to information and content. American social media platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook are banned inside China.
The report also details how China has invested in technology that aids authoritarianism, such as facial recognition software and other surveillance technology. This technology is now being exported to countries around the world, such as Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe and others.
The report focuses also on how digital surveillance is expanding to include the collection of DNA samples, fingerprints, voice samples and blood types — in particular from those in the western Xinjiang region, where the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a campaign to strip the minority of their language, culture and religion.
This week, the U.S. Commerce Department added 11 companies to a trade blacklist over alleged violations in Xinjiang, bringing the number of Chinese companies on the list to just under 50. In a statement following the sanctions, Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, said, “Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labor and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens.”
“This action will ensure that our goods and technologies are not used in the Chinese Communist Party’s despicable offensive against defenseless Muslim minority populations,” Ross added.
Human rights advocates studying China’s use of digital technologies to control its citizens have long argued that Western and other governments need to act against the Chinese government and its actions. The coronavirus pandemic has also led to a huge amount of data collection in China as a response to the public health crisis, and surveillance technology has also been used to identify critics of the government’s response.
Most recently, Beijing passed new national security laws in Hong Kong, which could potentially see the extension of the Chinese surveillance state into one of the freest Internet landscapes in the world. Google, Twitter, Facebook and others — that under the “one country, two systems” framework could operate freely in Hong Kong and in some cases have employees there — have now paused their data requests from Hong Kong authorities. Some American tech companies there have now shelved plans for future investment, and others are contemplating pulling employees out.
“What the Chinese government is trying to achieve is unprecedented in human history,” said Maya Wang, China senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “No other government has had such an intrusive knowledge of such a large number of people over such a wide swath of land anywhere at any time in history — and they are wielding that power of data.”
Wang argues that while it is legitimate for other governments to be “very, very worried about the Chinese government and the pursuit of this kind of digital totalitarianism,” the U.S. approach has been insufficient and amounts to a “whack-a-mole” approach with companies like Huawei and TikTok. Some policies of the Trump administration, she added, appear to be rooted in an anti-China approach, rather than a holistic approach on how to deal with the privacy and security of its citizens.
Menendez’s report argues that the Trump administration has failed to adequately respond to the threat posed by China’s approach to cyberspace, and that the U.S. government needs to rally the international community around the common goal of offering an alternative to the Chinese digital model.
Among the recommendations is that the United States should aggressively develop alternatives to Chinese 5G technology along with its allies, using federal funds, and create an industry consortium on 5G. The report also recommends that the United States should establish a fund to support organizations worldwide like NGOs and think tanks that are fighting to counter surveillance regimes.
“There has been a sharp increase in bipartisan interest for Congress to recalibrate our nation’s entire China policy,” he said.
“As more of my colleagues recognize the scope of the challenge that China presents to the United States and to the entire international order, it is my hope that this report will not only strengthen their sense of urgency to act but also inform the legislative process,” he added.
