BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
There’s big money in technology that enables China to keep tabs on citizens. But is it empowering tyranny?
BEFORE he became a billionaire,
Dai Lin would ride his bike to work, pedalling through the streets of
Tianjin to the headquarters of Tiandy Technologies, the camera maker he built with support from China’s government.
When Dai started his company in 1994, roadside surveillance cameras were rare in China. Now they’re everywhere, part of a hi-tech surveillance state that is stoking privacy and human rights concerns in the world’s most populous nation, raising thorny questions for international investors, and making well-connected entrepreneurs like Dai extremely rich.
The 54-year-old former academic, who now drives a luxury sedan and rewards high-performing employees with BMWS, is the latest of at least four businessmen to amass billiondollar fortunes from surveillance companies that count China’s government as a major client or investor.
Their combined net worth exceeds $12billion. That figure underscores the scale of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unprecedented push to keep tabs on the country’s 1.4billion people.
About 176million video surveillance cameras monitored China’s streets, buildings and public spaces in 2016, versus 50million in the US.
Xi’s government has spent about $184bn on domestic security. By
2020, authorities plan to roll out an “omnipresent” nationwide camera network and a social-credit system that tracks personal data on everything from traffic violations to video-game habits. It will soon be hard to go anywhere in Tianjin, or any other city in China, without being watched.
And it’s not just surveillancefocused firms like Tiandy that are helping the government expand its monitoring programmes; companies from Alibaba Group to Ping An Insurance Group and Tencent are playing increasingly important roles.
Look hard enough and you’ll find links to China’s surveillance state at nearly all of the nation’s most innovative businesses – several of which are staples of 401(k) accounts and other investment portfolios around the world.
Supporters of China’s surveillance activities say they’ve fostered trust, improved public safety and helped make the country a world leader in areas like artificial intelligence.
Critics, including billionaire philanthropist George Soros, say Xi’s government is exploiting technology to gain a dangerous level of control over its citizenry.
That concern has only grown in recent months amid reports of the suppression of Uighurs, the predominantly Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang province.
As Tiandy and its peers expand overseas, some worry that China’s surveillance industry might help governments from Africa to Latin America erode civil liberties.
Another fear, highlighted by US scrutiny of Huawei Technologies, is that exported Chinese surveillance equipment could be used by Beijing for spying. Huawei’s Hisilicon unit is a major supplier of chips that power surveillance cameras.
“The Chinese government’s approach to leveraging data for social control and management could bolster the coercive capability of the state in ways that have troubling implications, including for the future of democratic governance worldwide,’’ said Elsa Kania, adjunct senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.
“Many of the companies are exporting AI applications, such as facial recognition, that can be used for surveillance and enable repression.”
Chinese officials have repeatedly insisted that such concerns are without merit. In response to a critical speech on China’s surveillance programmes by Soros at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said the former hedge fund manager’s comments were “not even worth refuting”.
Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has denied helping Beijing spy.
Tiandy, whose name-and-shame surveillance systems in Tianjin identify jaywalkers and display their faces on street-side billboards, declined to comment on Dai’s net worth or the privacy issues surrounding China’s monitoring programmes.
Wuhan Guide Infrared, a maker of infrared cameras whose chairman has a net worth of $1.3bn, and Ping An, which develops smart sensing technology for local governments, both declined to comment.
Tencent, which has invested in surveillance-related start-ups, didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Alibaba’s cloud-computing unit said authorities using its “City Brain” technology have seen “tangible improvement in areas such as traffic flow and emergency response time”.
For all the concerns about government surveillance, views from inside China are often more apathetic.
Older residents have long been accustomed to living under the watchful eye of the Communist Party, and younger generations have grown up sharing nearly every aspect of their lives on social media.
While there have been sporadic outcries over alleged data-gathering overreach, many citizens are willing to sacrifice some of their privacy as long as China’s leaders keep delivering on promises of higher incomes and strong economic growth.