Late last year, authorities in Henan province reportedly launched a similar system to track what they see as “suspicious” journalists, foreign students and women. At the same time, prosecutors in Shanghai reportedly adopted AI prosecutors, who can file indictments on eight criminal offenses, including credit card fraud and charges of picking a quarrel and provoking trouble. Chinese online newspaper The Paper reported that a Communist Party school in Sichuan had developed “Smart Red Cloud” as early as 2017, which was already able to monitor party member reaction to its political education and “calculate” their loyalty.
Victims of China’s surveillance system
Several rights lawyers and activists told the media that they fell victim to China’s digital surveillance system. A rights activist from Wuhan, Hebei, said he was once taken away by police who were able to identify him after a roadside camera captured his face while he was on the street. A Beijing-based rights lawyer complained that he was unable to post online messages or make an online registration as a result of China’s tight censorship and digital tracking system. Another rights lawyer revealed that China’s police have been illegally collecting biometric data from the pupils of people’s eyes, fingerprints and urine samples of those in its custody to enhance what he called a “precise but evil” surveillance.
China’s widespread application of AI technologies, however, is stimulating the sector’s innovation, according to the findings of recent research by author Martin Beraja, an assistant professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and three other scholars at Harvard University and The London School of Economics and Political Science. Their research concluded, while new technology bolsters autocratic power and autocratic demand stimulates innovation, “this mutuality of advantage may even generate long-term, sustained AI innovation in China, creating what they call an AI-tocracy.”
AI-tocracy
“In the process of procuring that government contract, they AI firms in China get access to this data that allows them, of course, to innovate for the government application that has to do typically with public security or preventing crime, or the like. This has spilled over to their commercial innovation, because, potentially, they may use either the same government data or, if that’s restricted, they may use the same algorithms that were trained with that data to develop commercial products that are used in the private sector,” Beraja told the media. One such commercial software, for example, is used in supermarkets to track consumers as they move along the aisles, the professor added. Beraja, however, expressed concerned over China’s AI exports, which he found in his research are likely aiding other repressive governments.
“One thing that we do observe is that the countries that are more autocratic or relatively weak democracies are indeed importing more facial recognition AI from China, more likely facial recognition AI from China than other technologies. And to me that says that there is a sense in which these technologies indeed are used for surveillance and repression,” Beraja added. Zola, a prominent blogger from China who is now a citizen of Taiwan, said that most netizens in China oppose the country’s digital suppression although their opposition is often muted. He questioned the sustainability of China’s AI-tocracy.
“China may be exporting these technologies to other countries. But in the long run, such a governance model will lead a society to go to extremes…repeating the irrational policymaking pattern during the China’s Cultural Revolution period. That will lead to its own collapse,” Zola said.
