Orwell’s Nightmare is Coming True in China

Disclaimer: The Eqbal Ahmad Centre for Public Education (EACPE) encourages critical and independent thinking and believes in a free expression of one’s opinion. However, the views expressed in contributed articles are solely those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the EACPE.

You can contribute your writings at newsletter@eacpe.org

The Chinese Communist Party is creating a digital mass surveillance system – one that has its resonances in George Orwell’s 1984

Imagine living in a society where you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high social credit score has its perquisites: you are allowed access to high-speed internet service and a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make provocative political posts online, fail to pay your bills or delay on your debt, question the government’s narrative of events or if you are caught simply jaywalking, your score decreases. A low score means you lose some of your rights – you can’t buy a train ticket, you can’t eat at a restaurant, you can’t get a loan or insurance or leave the country. To calculate your citizen score, private companies aligned with the government constantly peruse through your online activity, extracting vital pieces of information and using it to plan your future in the country.

When you leave the online world and step outside of the house, your physical activity is also monitored and your actions swept into the dragnet: the government collects humongous amounts of information from the millions of surveillance cameras scattered across the alleys, streets, subways, restaurants, intersections and government facilities across the city. If you commit a crime, or if you are caught jaywalking, facial recognition algorithms will match your footage to the national criminal database. It won’t be long until the police show up at your doorstep and drag you across the porch handcuffed.

This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t a far-fetched fantasy: It may be China in a few years. The country is on its way to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance, and it has so far succeeded quite nicely. China now has eight of the ten most surveilled cities in the world. By harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data-mining and storage to construct detailed profiles of all citizens, China’s Communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to “incentivize” good behaviour. A sophisticated network of surveillance cameras now monitor millions of Chinese citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye (there, I said it!) may, in theory, improve public safety, it is increasingly becoming a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country already with one of the most repressive governments in the world.

George Orwell’s 1984 opens in Oceania, a dystopian world governed by an all-controlling totalitarian regime which runs a massive propaganda campaign to brainwash the population into thinking obedience to its leader – the Big Brother. Ingsoc – the ruling party – surveils and controls every aspect of the people’s lives; it monitors the thoughts and actions of the citizens meticulously and decides their fate accordingly. Under this repressive regime, just the thought of dissent – thoughtcrime – can lead to incarceration and possibly execution. Every word uttered and every step taken is closely watched. You cannot conceal yourself. The Big Brother is always watching you.

Perhaps no novel of the past century has had more influence on modern thought than Orwell’s 1984. It is an ineffable work of imagination shaped by the author’s experience fighting Spain’s Fascist government and his subsequent disillusionment with the resistance – of which he was a part – that intended to establish authoritarianism in its place. Many of the words coined by the author reverberate in the vocabulary of the 21st century as signs of a nightmarish future. With the mass-surveillance systems being tested in many countries around the globe, and our electronic devices eavesdropping on our conversations and monitoring our actions, Orwell’s nightmare seems all too familiar. It is almost impossible to talk about surveillance, totalitarianism, authoritarian politics and state-sponsored propaganda without dropping a reference to 1984.

1984 is not a long book – my copy is just 254 pages. One can finish it off in just a few sittings. Reading the book was in many ways a disabusing experience. There were times when I stopped and questioned: “Will this dystopia ever become a reality?” I kept wondering if the world will ever witness such a system of digital totalitarianism and mass surveillance, and my answer was always no. This is the 21st century we are living in, I thought. True, the requisite technology is at our disposal, but there are checks and balances to everything, including surveillance. Individual privacy is a great deal these days. The more I thought about it, the more far-fetched it seemed. But then I read about China, and things changed. The Oceania that I feared so much was thriving next door.

With millions of cameras and billions of lines of codes, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. It is embracing and encouraging emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and data mining to track and monitor its 1.4 billion citizens. With crucial help from the thriving technology industry, China is implementing a ginormous system of algorithmic surveillance. By the end of 2021, a billion cameras around the country will monitor the Chinese citizens. China is justifying mass surveillance as a security measure – the sophisticated system can identify criminals, dissidents and activists and sound a virtual alarm to the local police. The police then arrive at the scene and the suspect is apprehended. The intended crime never occurs and everybody is safe.

China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a democratizer, bringing people more freedom and connecting them to the world. China is using technology as a means of control. The high-tech surveillance system identifies not only criminals, but also activists, journalists, dissidents and lawyers – basically anyone that stands up to the Chinese Communist Party or opposes the government’s account of events. In other parts of the country, the technology is being used to single-out and subdue minorities. In some cities, billboard-sized screens show the photos of jaywalkers and those failing to pay their debts. The idea here is to publicly shame the offenders into doing what they are supposed to do. Security cameras equipped with artificial intelligence software line up the entrances to many government and non-government complexes.

China’s massive algorithmic surveillance system is rapidly expanding, and it is no longer limited to just monitoring the Chinese citizens. The Communist Party is now implementing the pervasive social credit system that calls for the unified record system of the Chinese citizens to be tracked and evaluated for trustworthiness. This new system will consolidate reams of records from private companies and government bureaucracies into a single citizen score for each individual. What you buy at the shops and online, where are you at any given time and how long you stay there, what bills and taxes you pay (or not), and how many hours you spent watching movies and video games adds to your credit score. Data-collecting behemoths similar to Google, Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp constantly monitor your activity and feed all that data to the national surveillance database. From there, your behavior is rated either positive or negative and distilled into a single number: your citizen score. That citizen score then tells the government – and everybody else – how trustworthy, or otherwise, you are. And that’s not it. Your credit score is then publicly ranked to the rest of the population and this ranking then determines whether you are eligible for a job or a mortgage, where your children will go to school and if you will find a date.

The planned data-focused social credit system is only one facet of China’s ambitious algorithmic surveillance system. Another is the fledgling network of technologies, like CCTV cameras manned with advanced AI, to monitor citizens’ physical activity. The Ministry of Public Safety – China’s national police force – states that the law enforcement should use facial recognition technology combined with security cameras to catch lawbreakers on the loose. Even though the goal of this system is to capture criminals and deter crime, it poses serious threats to individual privacy. The modicum of freedom that the Chinese citizens have acquired since the Maoist era is now being jeopardized. There are unreasonable punishments for minor crimes: authorities in certain cities are publicly shaming jaywalkers by showing their faces on public displays or sending them to their employers. More ominous are the punishments likely to be inflicted upon people for their association with dissidents and critics. Thus the installation of an all-seeing-eye alarms the civil liberties and privacy advocates worldwide. The government is already watching the online activity of human rights activists on the pretext of “stability maintenance”, and the surveillance is only growing worse.

The Chinese government has long scrutinized individual citizens for evidence of disloyalty to the regime; it is now implementing a constantly evolving, granular and extremely precise records on its citizens’ political comments, associations and even consumer habits. What’s more worrying is that under this new system, the government will be able to consider the behavior of the family and friends of a citizen in determining his score. It is possible that your friend’s anti-government stance may lower your credit score. The idea here is to isolate the dissidents from society by rendering them complete pariahs. This would strictly limit their ability to preach their ideas to others and seeds of dissent will be nipped in the bud. As one privacy commentator warns: “What China is doing here is selectively breeding its population to select against the trait of critical, independent thinking.”

Like every other civilization, surveillance has also been a part of China’s history. The emperors of this 5,000-year-old complex social organization well understood the relationship between information flow and power, and how consequential surveillance was. During the 11^th century, the Song-dynasty ruler realized that China’s opaque-walled cities had become too large and numerous to monitor from a single location, so he deputized locals to police them. A few decades before the digital revolution, Chiang Kai-shek resuscitated the tradition of self-policing, asking the citizens to watch for dissidents in their midst, so that communist rebellions could be smothered in the cradle. But that did not happen – communist overthrow did occur and Mao came into power. After coming into power, Mao arranged cities into grids, making each square its own work unit, where spies kept sharp eyes for counterrevolutionary behavior, no matter how trivial.

The incumbent Chinese President Xi Jingping appropriated the phrase “sharp eyes” as his chosen name for the network of surveillance cameras that will soon span China. With Artificial Intelligence, Xi will be able to install the most repressive authoritarian apparatus the world has ever seen. In China’s sprawling AI start-ups – Megvii, SenseTime, CloudWalk – he has found willing commercial partners for his surveillance program and in Xinjiang’s Muslim minority, he has found the ideal test population.

A crude version of China’s algorithmic surveillance system is already operational in the southwestern province of Xinjiang where more than one million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious group in the world since the fall of the Third Reich. There, the system is being tested and improved, and once it reaches perfection, it will spread across the country. Even though experts predict that, despite China’s burgeoning technology capabilities, America will maintain its AI supremacy for another decade. But that’s an old comfort: China is already building surveillance tools and exporting them across the world to actual and would-be autocracies. If not checked in time, these technologies will go global: a new generation of autocracies will emerge with China at their head. The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people around the world from securing any measure of political freedom. Orwell’s nightmare is in the making.

In Xinjiang, the fortunate Uighurs who are spared the prison are the most heavily surveilled human population on earth. And not all of that is digital: Chinese government is now sending these “big brothers and sisters” – busybodies with the dual aim of denouncing individuals with anti-government inclinations to the authorities and monitoring the Uighurs’ forced assimilation into the Chinese culture – to live with, dine with and, in extreme cases, sleep with the Uighurs. Meanwhile, AI-powered sensors lurk everywhere from community buildings to the locals’ purses and pockets. When Xi’s campaign of cultural assimilation reached its crescendo, many Uighurs buried their phones containing Islamic material and froze their memory cards in dumplings for safekeeping. In a province where visiting the mosque, purchasing prayer rugs, or downloading sermons from your favorite imam can get you in a concentration camp, such cautionary practices become the new normal.

But the police have since forced the Uighurs to install nanny apps on their phones, which uses algorithms to hunt for “ideological viruses” day and night. The usual work-arounds are not an option for the Uighurs: they can’t install VPNs out of fear they might attract trouble. This means that they can’t download WhatsApp, Messenger, Line, Telegram or any other prohibited encrypted-chat software. These nanny apps work in tandem with the police, who spot-check phones of checkpoints, scrolling through the individual’s messages and call log. Even a harmless digital association – like staying in contact with a mosque attendee or donating to a mosque – can result in detention. Staying away from social media is no solution either, as your digital absence can raise suspicions on your trustworthiness. The police note if the Uighurs deviate from their standard behavior. The government wants to know if the Uighurs are leaving the houses from the back door more often than the front door. If they spent more – or less – time talking to their neighbors than they used to. Even their electricity consumption is monitored and unusual usage can mean an unregistered visitor might be staying at a house. The things that we take for granted elsewhere are a luxury for Uighurs in Xinjiang. Imagine living in a country where throwing a chewing gum on the sidewalk can jeopardize your child’s academic future – I simply can’t.

China is going to outrageous lengths to monitor its citizens. In Xinjiang, the Uighurs can only travel a few blocks without encountering a police checkpoint manned with AI-powered surveillance cameras. The footage from these cameras is matched with the snapshots taken by the police at local “health checks.” At these checks, the police gather all the data they can from the Uighurs’ bodies: they swab DNA, take blood samples, measure weight and height and record voices. In some disturbing scenarios, the Uighurs have been forced to participate in experiments to mine their genetic data. Women are also made to endure pregnancy checks. Some are forced to get abortions or contraception; others are simply sterilized. The police are known to rip unauthorized children away from their parents, who are then detained. Such measures have reduced the birth rate in some places in Xinjiang by 60%. Such gruesome practices have a historical resonace in Nazi Germany, where Hitler employed such strategy to annihilate the Jewry. But Xi Jingping has different goals – creating frightened, servile citizens and solidifying his government for life.

Xi Jingping has used Xinjiang as a laboratory to fine-tune the sensory and analytical powers of his digital panopticon before expanding its reach to the rest of the country. The state-owned CETC that built much of Xinjiang’s surveillance system now boasts of similar projects in other parts of the country, like Shenzhen, Guangdong, Zhejiang. And this represents only one fraction of China’s coalescing network of human-monitoring technology.

But why China, one might ask. The United States has similar, if not better, technology at its disposal, and so do many other developed countries of the world. Why is it that this technology is being used for tyranny only in China? The fact is, China has an ideal setting for such an experiment. It is home to 1.4 billion extremely online people. The country is home to a billion mobile phones, all chock-full of sophisticated sensors, each measuring a specific activity of its owner. All of this data collected from the mobile phones is then time-stamped and geo-tagged. New regulations now require telecom companies to scan the faces of citizens before they can sign up for services. So all the phone’s data can now be attached to a person’s face: the state knows which citizen uses which phone and can, therefore, monitor her activity. There are no constitutional limits to surveillance in China, and then there is an authoritarian government willing to exploit these loopholes for political gains. Combine these factors with China’s always-online citizens, and you will understand why the country is heading towards an Orwellian future.

One might think that mass surveillance will be confined to China’s megacities. Out in the countryside, away from the hustle bustle of cities and out of the state’s Orwellian eye, China’s citizens will enjoy significant freedom and peace of mind. But that is just a fancy: the government is now employing several methods to acquire the biometric data of villagers in the rural settings around the county. Out in the countryside, the villagers line up to get their faces scanned by private firms in exchange for pieces of cookware.

Until recently, it was hard to imagine how China will integrate all of this data into a single surveillance system, but no longer. The government has tasked private companies with building AI-powered software platforms that gather all the data and feed it into a single repository. These digital nerve centers, capable of synthesizing data streams from a multitude of sensors distributed in an urban environment. Most of its proposed uses are benign technocratic functions. The algorithms could count people and cars to adjust the red-light timing, they could locate lost children or luggage, flag loiterers, homeless people and rioters. Anyone in danger could wave her hand in a distinct manner in front of a surveillance camera and the AI will direct earpiece-wearing police officers at the site.

Straight out of the pages of 1984 is China’s emotion-recognition technology. The government is now experimenting with this technology and honing it for mass implementation in the future. In this technology, the facial expressions of anger, sadness, happiness and boredom are tracked. The industry is booming in China where Xi Jingping and others have emphasized on the creation of “positive energy” and a part of the ideological campaign to encourage certain kinds of feelings and limit others. Imagine holding a grudge against the government – the surveillance cameras manned with AI recognize your dissatisfaction and report the authorities. Soon, the police will be at your doorstep and you’ll find yourself in a re-education camp – a Room 101 of some kind.

In decades to come, these systems and their successors may even be able to read unspoken thoughts. The technology is already in the making: drones can be controlled by helmets that sense and transmit neural signals, and researchers are now designing brain-computer interfaces that will go well beyond auto-fill by allowing you to type just by thinking. An authoritarian regime like China’s could force the makers of such software to feed every blip of the citizens’ neural data into the government database. The government could use emotion-tracking software to monitor reactions to political stimulus in an app. A silent response to a meme or a clip of Xi’s speech could be valuable data for the precog algorithm. What George Orwell imagined as thoughcrime might be an actual thing in China.

China’s experiments with digital surveillance pose a grave threat to the freedom of expression and other human rights of the Chinese citizens. Increasingly, the citizens will refrain from any kind of independent critical expression out of the fear that their activity will be monitored and penalized by the government. And that is exactly what the program intends to achieve. It aims to brainwash the Chinese citizens into thinking obedience to the government and, by extension, the Chinese Communist Party. What is more concerning is that what emerges in China will not remain in China. History has shown us repeatedly that authoritarianism is not localized – it has a tendency to spread to other countries as well. For this reason – if not for the freedom of the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens – democracies around the world should hold Beijing accountable for the Orwellian world it is creating.