Jaywalk in Shanghai, attend a mosque service in Xinjiang, use too much toilet paper at home, or simply walk through a public square in Jiangsu province and you probably have been visually identified, and your transgression caught, by China’s whole-of-government, security surveillance system. The objective of China’s new 50 million plus cameras and 100 billion plus data points collected in its big data analytics program is to ensure “domestic tranquility” and to “improve social development.” By perceiving and predicting behavior the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) intends to stop future crime, social unrest, disloyalty, and other behaviors deemed inappropriate by the state.
China is building “smart cities” to integrate facts concerning every move made by residents and their vehicles, into a single computer platform, filled with massive amounts of personal information. When complete the software will download the vast amounts of big data into a “police cloud” to create a comprehensive picture of every citizen. It is scheduled for completion in 2020. The Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) is at the center of the Chinese government’s security plan. According to a recently released RAND Corporation study on Chinese views of big data analysis, the IJOP incorporates advanced facial recognition software, infrared cameras, and Wi-Fi “sniffers” to identify computers. It will accumulate other personal data including genetic information, fingerprints, blood types, iris scans, and reports from police interrogations. No one’s medical information will be private.
When finished the IJOP will have the capacity to track how much money is in a citizen’s bank account, conduct government tax audits, identify events people attend, and even cross-reference arrests and detentions in a 21st century version of an Orwellian state. Using 75 different behavioral indicators the IJOP assigns risk factors to individuals according to data points such as the length of time spent abroad, unusual electric consumption, or attendance at a mosque. It also can determine if someone is using an app to avoid the invasive surveillance.
The top-down leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is wary of domestic unrest by ethnical minorities and, literally, fears the Muslim Uighurs in western China. Beijing’s solution is to place cameras outside the homes of Muslim religious leaders and then identify, and detain, people who associate with them. The MPS and its IJOP system then predicts whether they represent a high risk to the state’s preservation of order. If they are scored as a threat to the state, or the CCP, they are sent to brutal reeducation camps with open-ended sentences. Their families also are subject to police investigation and extrajudicial detention. The explanation is attributed to the government’s beneficent intent to reduce potential future crime. China is integrating big data analytics, the use of computers to make sense of large data sets, across the entire country. This is an intermediary step before establishing a full artificial intelligence system to control and monitor Chinese citizens using only computer algorithms.
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The Chinese State Council officially unveiled its intent “to keep pace with the leading countries in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and applications” to enable it to become a major technology center of innovation and, within the decade, dominate the field. State-backed big data and AI research companies initially focused on technologies such as facial recognition for ATM machines. By 2019 it had morphed into a program that helped the communist giant arrest well over 10,000 Chinese citizens in less than four years. The world needs to question how the CCP’s leadership will further leverage these advanced technologies and the implications these advances hold for the Chinese military.
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Friday, she presents key updates on China.
Illustration: Pixabay