Big Brother getting even bigger in China
How will the massive amount of data about a Chinese citizen be captured? By smartphones, surveillance cameras, and the ongoing capturing of data from China’s already nearly captured citizenry. But smartphones are the key for the data collection efforts.
Many Chinese citizens do not use cash very much, but rely on their phones for most of their transactions for goods and services. China makes about $5.5 trillion annually in mobile sales compared with the United States’ $112 billion.
With GPS now a common feature of smartphones, data can be captured about a person’s movements. In addition, the many apps available today store information on appointments, pictures, text messages, and video streams. You name it, and there’s an app for it.
China is also increasing its use of facial recognition apps to pay for a service, open security gates, even unlock doors.
In fairness, China can use these systems to enhance credit checks, just as the U.S. does with credit-checking agencies. And like the U.S., the systems can be used to keep track and possibly apprehend law-breakers.
Nonetheless, this writer finds the pervasiveness of the Social Credit and Trust Score systems into individual lives of citizens to be chilling. All for what? Not for China itself, but for the Communist Party of China. Subsequent articles about China will address other aspects of the country’s structure and strategies (the Communist Party itself; freezing-out America’s companies; Taiwan; off-shore islands, and others). For now, I close this article with a quote about China’s dealing with its northwest region of Xinjiang, an area seeking separation from China.
Granted, Xinjiang is populated with a hostile Muslim Uighur minority population. So, perhaps the close monitoring of a potential deadly opponent is prudent. My point is the efficacy of the use of digital surveillance systems that are taking place in China. As quoted in The Week, Feb. 9, 2018:
“(In certain areas) almost every aspect of daily life is monitored. Surveillance cameras read all license plates and alert police to the presence of out-of-region cars. Authorities use hand-held devices to search smartphones for banned encrypted-chat apps and politically suspect videos. The police checkpoints that dot the city are equipped with machines that can scan ID card faces and eyeballs. Anyone who buys a knife — which can be used in a terrorist attack — must have ID details etched by laser on the blade.”
Who are we to judge the threat the Uighurs pose to Chinese security and the Chinese measures to combat them? Again, the point of this article is the degree to which the Chinese are evolving their society into a semblance of an Orwellian state.
Should we care? In the short run, we can lament for the Chinese citizen, but it is not the function of the United States to “bring democracy” to China. We are coming to realize that China, Russia, Afghanistan and others do not want America’s views of capitalism and democracy.
China, through the Communist Party, is undertaking these actions because of its own insecurity, its fear of itself, and its illegitimate origin and existence.
Risking a Chicken Little, “The Sky is Falling” syndrome, let we Americans be on guard about the encroaching power of the smartphone, digital surveillance, and their big data, big brother potential. We are a long way from what China is doing. Let’s maintain that distance.
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Uyless Black is an author, researcher and frequent Press analyst and commentator. He and his wife, Holly, reside in Hayden.