The Government uses facial recognition technology, cameras and censorship of political and historical information to keep the population under surveillance
Macarena vidal liy
Beijing 4 JUN 2019
If there is something that seems impossible today, is that they can be repeated in the center of Beijing, or anywhere else in China, demonstrations like those of Tiananmen in the spring of 1989. Before the Chinese government sent some 300.000 soldiers, tanks and armored vehicles bloodily dissolve the students who demanded transparency and democracy thirty years ago this Tuesday, Nearly a million people gathered in those protests in the main square of the capital. Since then, China has made stability its main objective, and to guarantee it it has invested enormous resources in its internal security. Traditional censorship and harsh treatment of dissidents is now combined with the use of cutting-edge technology to guarantee strict control..
It is not that there is a great appetite among the Chinese population to protest against their Government. Three decades of spectacular economic growth make the vast majority satisfied, with more or less nuances, with the system. The campaign against corruption has made the president Xi Jinping a very popular leader. Y, as a newspaper editorial boasted this MondayGlobal Times, nationalist line, “Tiananmen immunized China against turbulence”. Even so, The regime prefers to stay healthy and points to the maintenance of public order as reasons., the terrorist risk and infiltration of undesirable foreign ideas.
Thousands of demonstrations are held every year in all parts of China.. The vast majority protest against labor problems, environmental scams or scandals. None lasts too long or reaches large dimensions: the control of social networks and urban surveillance systems take care of this.
This control becomes visible every 4 June, the anniversary of the massacre that the Government wants to keep under the carpet at all costs. “At this time, censorship increases after the Great Cyber Wall, that blocks web pages and content and the computer tools used to access them”, Paul Bischoff points out, from the cybersecurity company Comparitech. “Inside China, any mention of the massacre or the 4 June (6-4, how it is referred to in Mandarin) is removed from search engines, messaging apps, news portals, blogs and social networks. The editorial of Global Times is not, of course, available in the Chinese version of the newspaper, only in English.
Investment in internal security is higher than that in Defense. only in 2017, according to the calculations of the German anthropologist Adrian Zenz, Public spending on internal security reached 197.000 Millions of dollars, almost a 20% more than the official military budget. The previous year, the allocation for internal security had grown by 17,6%, according to academic data.
Zenz's figures expressly exclude investment in surveillance equipment or urban security, which he estimates represent another tens of millions of dollars. China, analysts calculate, has become the world's leading market for security equipment and one of the main suppliers.
According to the market analysis company IHS Markit, China represented in 2017 he 44% of all global video surveillance equipment revenues. In between 2012 and 2017, the Chinese market grew 13,3% annual average, while that of the rest of the world increased by 2,6% annual. in 2016, according to this company, this country had 176 millions of surveillance cameras. To 2022, according to data analysis company IDC, That figure could reach 2.760 millions, almost two per person.
They are not just cameras. Chinese companies and research centers have opted for facial recognition technologies, of voice or even the way of walking. And they export them. According to the NGO Freedom House, in 18 of 65 countries that he analyzed in his report Freedom on the Internet 2018, Chinese companies like Yitu, Hikvision –The Spanish Police deployed anti-drone rifles from this company in the Champions League final-, o CloudWalk “are combining advances in artificial intelligence and facial recognition to create systems capable of identifying threats to thepublic order”.
Minority policing
To a large extent, increased spending has gone to the Xinjiang region, home of the Uyghur minority, de religión musulmana. The NGO Human Rights Watch has documented in that region a recurrent use of technology for mass surveillance that uses QR codes., artificial intelligence, big data, biometric data and spyware on phones. She further , The Government “has mobilized more than a million officials and police to supervise the people, even through programs that intrude on privacy, in which supervisors are assigned to stay regularly in people's homes.", explained last September in a report.
The Chinese Government has also established regulations that allow it to increase control over the internet.. The new Cybersecurity law, which came into effect last year, requires companies to store all their data on Chinese users within China and to take steps to “immediately interrupt transmission.”” prohibited content. The rule also reinforces the requirement that the companies behind social networks and telephone operators register their users with their authentic name.. As a result, These firms have hired electronic control programs and thousands of moderators in charge of supervising their content to ensure that everything conforms to official guidelines..
“Most of what we remove has to do with pornography, but also problematic content from a political point of view”, explains a worker from one of these companies, who requests anonymity.
Only between October and November of last year, according to official data, censorship blocked 9.800 accounts from independent information providers whose content was determined to be “harmful to the image of the nation”. In three weeks of January, The Chinese Cyberspace Administration had eliminated 7 millions of messages, cerrado 700 web pages and disabled 9.300 mobile phone applications.
Reports of protests disappear quickly. Comments containing certain keywords do not reach their recipients on social networks. From 2015, according to government data, have been closed 13.000 Internet pages with “dirty” content. A study by the University of Toronto and the University of Hong Kong has identified 3.237 words related to Tiananmen and censored. Yet, through the use of software or alternative words, Chinese citizens usually obtain the information or transmit the messages they want.
But it is not something that Beijing has the slightest intention of relaxing on.. Not even, apparently, although the success of its trade negotiations with the US is at stake. UU. As published by the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, which cites two Chinese sources, the positions of the two countries clashed, among other reasons, because Washington demanded that Beijing “completely open its internet”. “China can only agree to open some areas selectively. A completely open internet is impossible”, one of those sources stressed.
