How U.S. Tech Created China’s Police State

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Next to Silicon Valley, where major U.S. tech firms are urged to stop exports to the Chinese police, with some lawmakers asking that they appear before Congress. Now, this comes after a recent Associated Press investigation revealed the direct role the U.S. companies have played in building Beijing’s mass surveillance state. AP reporter Dake Kang investigated this story, and he joins Hari Sreenivasan to talk about the complicity of American technology.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Investigative reporter, Dake Kang from the Associated Press. Thanks so much for joining us. You had a recent piece that uncovered a layer of surveillance that’s going on in China that had been previously unreported. But you, in your report – through documents that were handed over from a whistleblower – found connections to American companies. What’d you find?

 

DAKE KANG: Yeah. Basically what we found in these documents is that, you know, in the past there’s been reporting about how American companies have provided components or products to the Chinese police. But what we found is that actually these American companies not only sold some goods to the Chinese police, they actually were complicit in designing the entire system from the top down and working very closely with the Chinese authorities in building the system.

And so when you look at, you know, the Chinese policing apparatus as it is today, I mean, it wouldn’t have existed without the assistance of American companies. From the very beginning, you know, back 25 years ago, American companies were there right at the start designing and building these systems to a large degree so that the Chinese police could carry out, you know, government repression, censorship and control of its own people.

 

SREENIVASAN: You write, “Some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens. Marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco and Seagate, show their sales pitches made both publicly and privately cited Communist Party catchphrases on crushing protest, including ‘stability maintenance,’ ‘key persons’ and ‘abnormal gatherings,’ and named groups that stifle dissent such as ‘internal internet police,’ ‘sharp eyes’ and ‘the Golden Shield.’” What’s the Golden Shield?

 

KANG: Yeah. So the Golden Shield is basically China’s digital policing apparatus. When it got started, it was a way of kind of getting a hold of the internet. You know, the, the internet was this thing that the Chinese authorities saw as being uncontrollable. Anyone could just go log on online and say whatever they wanted. And so the Chinese authorities wanted some way to be able to control it. And then from that project came this whole digital policing apparatus. 

 

They saw that the Chinese government had this need for digital censorship and surveillance, and they pitched their products for the Golden Shield, for the use of the Chinese police. And, you know, some of the companies, they, they kind of vary in what, what they were selling. You know, some companies say ‘oh, we were just only selling hard drives, or we were just selling kind of, you know, general purpose equipment and stuff like that.’ But when you actually look at these marketing materials, you find that a lot of these companies were very well aware of what their products were going to be used for. 

 

Some of the most damning material that we found was actually these classified government blueprints that showed that IBM actually worked with a Chinese military and defense contractor to build out the Golden Shield, phase two. And in those blueprints, you can actually see them say things like, you know, ‘consolidate communist party rule.’ You see these documents that you see databases that show that they’re monitoring people like, you know, followers of dissident religious groups or people in the far western region of Xinjiang where, you know, many Western governments say that there was a, there was a genocide. And so you see these documents and you see that these companies were actually quite active in pitching their gear to the Chinese police. And this is something that continues all the way up until quite recently, even though there’s been repeated warnings about the way the Chinese police were using this kind of technology.

And so, you know, if you dig into these marketing materials, sometimes you see references to race. You know, one post we found from Dell advertised, you know, all-race recognition with one of their facial powered facial recognition powered laptops. They’re, they’re talking about things like ‘blacklisted individuals,’ ‘key personnel,’ which is this, this term that they use to track people that they think are politically sensitive. So, you know, a lot of American companies in the past have basically claimed ignorance. They say ‘oh, we don’t really know how our gear is being used, we don’t really have any control over that, but what our article shows is that that’s not the case.

 

SREENIVASAN: For the record, IBM says “if older systems,” – because some of these contracts were back in the early two thousands – “if older systems are being abused today, and IBM has no knowledge that they are, the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago. And in no way reflects on IBM today.”

So, you know, in your story, you said that the, the Xinjiang government has said, we are using this, basically these technologies to “Prevent and combat terrorists and criminal activity. There is absolutely no such thing as large-scale human rights violations.” Does that ring true considering what you’ve seen on the ground?

 

KANG: Absolutely not. I’ve gone to Xinjiang personally, you know, almost half a dozen times. And I’ve seen people, you know, be ordered into lines and having their phones checked personally. I’ve seen, you know, particularly members of the Uighur ethnicity being singled out while members of China’s Han Majority ethnicity are kind of waved through security checkpoints. 

 

And so, you know, the Chinese government has obviously gone on this big push to promote what it is doing in Xinjiang as being about combating terrorism, because they realized that this was damaging their reputation. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, you, you have in your story this description of what’s called basically a digital cage. Explain to our audience what that is, and you profile a family, but you, you say that this is, this might affect up to a hundred thousand human beings in China. What’s a digital cage? How does it work?

 

KANG: What the digital cage is, is that there’s all these kind of invisible digital electronic systems that are kind of in place, that are able to monitor, and in some cases, control the movement of the Chinese people. And for the vast majority of Chinese people, this is not a problem, because, you know, most people are not explicitly political. They’re not going on the streets or, you know, chanting or doing anything along those lines. And so these systems are not aimed directly at them. 

  

But the moment you do something that catches the state’s attention for whatever reason, you know, you say something against the party or whatever it is, then all of a sudden you might get blacklisted. And then if you’re blacklisted, all of a sudden your life can totally change, right? You have police suddenly following you around, or you try to buy train tickets, and then you get intercepted on the other side where there’s officers waiting for you. 

 

I know this very well myself because as a journalist, you know, I’m also a person that the state does monitor very closely. Obviously, I’m not in the same situation because they treat me with a certain degree of deference knowing that I’m a foreign journalist. But, there’s this sense that you’re always being watched, and that, you know, at any time the authorities could intervene in the situation. And what, you know, this kind of digital policing is actually invisible to most people, and that’s actually what makes it so insidious. It’s repression, but it’s invisible repression.

 

SREENIVASAN: What are some of the human costs of this? I mean, what’s the consequence to some of the people that you’ve been talking to in your stories?

 

KANG” Yeah. I mean, this is something that I would really like to, you know, — I hope comes across in the story is that this surveillance, it may not be prison. It may not necessarily be torture directly, but it’s a form of psychological torture. That’s the way a lot of my interviewees phrased it, right? I mean, just the sense of just constantly being watched and monitored, it, it can turn you into a social pariah. 

 

I mean, you know, one of the interviewees in our piece is basically a prisoner in his own home. He’s basically stuck at home. Every time he goes out, there’s police officers following him. They might tell him not to go certain places. His his own family, they’re freaked out by the officers constantly following them, and they’ve cut off all contact with him, right? And so, you know, for people who are targets of this digital policing apparatus, I mean, it’s, it’s real. It really extracts a huge toll. And the moment you end up crossing the line in any way, then they can come after you and they can arrest you. And then they have all of this information that they’ve compiled on you, that lists out, you know, what you’ve done wrong, and then they can end up putting you in prison. 

 

You know, sometimes there’s things like police officers following you, and then when you do something they don’t like, even if it’s technically legal, they end up beating you up. I mean, that’s something that one of the interviewees in our story faced. He was beaten by bricks by the police, and he ended up in the hospital. But even when he was in the hospital, you know, there were officers that were outside his hospital ward inside hanging a surveillance camera above his face on an IV drip. I mean, it’s really surveillance to an extreme.

 

SREENIVASAN: So you point out in your reporting that it’s not just IBM that sold their software into China in the first place decades ago. You, you said, you know, here, it’s that Oracle, Hewlett Packard, ArcGIS developer of Esri, sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of geographic and mapping equipment and software to Chinese police. Nvidia and Intel, the chip companies, have partnered with Chinese surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to cameras used for video surveillance. Other companies like Intel, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital — and these are, it’s an enormous list of companies you’re talking about. 

 

And for, before I let you answer here, you point out that, “Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Tech conglomerate, Broadcom, which acquired VMware and Cloud company, pivotal in ‘23, did not comment on the record. HP, Motorola and Huadi did not respond. IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher, and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies. Seagate and Western Digital said they adhere to all relevant laws and regulations where they operate And Esri denied involvement, but did not reply to examples. Microsoft told AP had found no evidence that it knowingly sold technology to the military or police as part of updates to the Golden Shield. So what kind of software did they sell? Are they possibly maintaining? 

 

KANG: Some companies, you know, they’re actually actively marketing to the Chinese police for the purposes of the control of their own people, right? So that, you know, in that particular case, companies might say, we didn’t really know how our gear was being used, but the marketing material there says otherwise, right? 

 

Another thing that this really tells you is that there’s a really wide variety of companies that are involved, right? I mean, Thermo Fisher for — Thermo Fisher, for example, what they’re selling is actually DNA testing kits and things like that. They were actually explicitly marketing the ability of their test kits to also test members of China’s Uyghur and Tibetan ethnicities as well, right?

And so what you see here is that you really have like a broad array of American tech companies. They all kind of rushed into China you know, in the early 2000s, because they saw China as being this huge untapped market. A lot of them ignored warnings about how that technology was being used. And then they end up, you know, selling often knowingly to the Chinese police for purposes of repression.

 

SREENIVASAN: There’s a response from Nvidia that kind of begs a different question. Nvidia says, look, it does not make surveillance systems or software. It does not work with police in China. Has not designed the H20 chip for police surveillance, and relationships with Chinese surveillance firms no longer continue. I mean, there’s this argument that tech companies are gonna make that, look, I’m selling a general use technology, right? A chip is a chip. You could put it in your phone, you could put it in your graphics processor and play video games with it. You could use it for AI and large language models. You can’t penalize us for that, that’s not what we’re doing. Nvidia is in kind of a special case where the U.S. government is going to take 15% of any chip sales that it makes to China, right? What, what’s the, what’s the danger here?

 

KANG: Yeah, so Nvidia is a really interesting case as you point out, because chip companies like Nvidia and Intel will make the argument that they really can’t control where their chips go. The thing about that though is that we found evidence that both Nvidia and Intel actively partnered with Chinese surveillance companies for policing applications. And in Nvidia’s case they actually worked with a Chinese police research institute. You know, they were testing facial recognition software with Nvidia chips. And so what you’re seeing here is that these companies are on the one hand saying they’re not explicitly being designed for the purposes of surveillance, but they’re very much assisting companies in figuring out how their chips can be used for surveillance applications.

And so, you know, we, we, we grilled them about it. I mean, we pointed to specific relationships that they had with specific Chinese companies. In many of the cases, they kind of dismissed them saying, Oh, you know, that was in the past after the US government sanctioned those Chinese companies, we no longer have any business ties with them. But some partnerships with other companies continue. I mean, we saw in the case of Nvidia that they actually touted how two Chinese companies who do sell to Chinese police were using Nvidia chips. 

 

And so I, that really begs the question. I mean, are they just adhering to the letter of the law, not the spirit of it? All the American companies that we spoke to say that they comply with U.S. export controls. But what we’re seeing is that they’re really kind of walking right up to the line of what is permissible. We did not find, you know, hard evidence of violation of export controls. Export controls are very complicated. But in a lot of these cases, what these companies are doing is that they’re actively working with these Chinese surveillance companies so long as they’re not being sanctioned. And so, you know, even though these chips are not being designed for the purposes of surveillance, they still very much end up in surveillance applications and with the assistance of these chip companies.

 

SREENIVASAN: Since you’ve published your report, I mean, senators like Josh Hawley from Missouri have said, Look, maybe these people, these companies need to be summoned in front of Congress because there seem to be fairly sizable loopholes inside the existing export laws that enable this to happen. And this, you know, from what what you’re showing here, is that it’s not just kind of the activists that are complaining, and it’s not just Democrats, but there seems to be some kind of a, a, a bipartisan consensus that this kind of behavior needs to be regulated.

 

KANG: Absolutely. You know, for this has been a issue for, for decades, right? There’s been congressional hearings about this since the mid-2000s. But every time, you know, con — members of Congress or people in the U.S. government have tried to do something about this to close those loopholes, there’s been pushback from American tech companies. You know, so they spend a lot of money lobbying on the issue, ensuring that bills that could potentially close the loophole never come to a vote. You know, you have all these bureaucratic procedures. The Department of Commerce is responsible for export controls, and they’ve actually tried numerous times to close some of these loopholes, but they’ve always ended up running out of time and facing opposition before they’re actually able to put through those changes… 

 

And so this has, this has been a longstanding issue, absolutely a bipartisan one.

 

SREENIVASAN: It’s worth noting that the White House, the Department of Commerce, you know, did not respond to your requests for comment in the story. 

 

You know, one other idea that I I —  it was fascinating in your piece is that right now your piece focuses on the influence that American technology companies had on the surveillance that’s happening in the Chinese state, and that Chinese companies could have advanced that technology further. But what’s also interesting is that you also point out that, Look, there — this type of surveillance is being used well beyond China, that there is facial recognition software that’s being used, whether it’s on the southern border of the United States or in Gaza by Israel, right?

 

KANG: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we really wanted to emphasize in writing this report is that this is not just a China problem. I think a lot of people tend to think of, you know, China as being this kind of digital totalitarian state. There’s a lot of discourse about that, right? But it’s not just a China issue. And in fact, I think it’s quite telling that it was American companies that brought a lot of this technology to China, because that means that it’s also an American problem. And that’s something that one of our interviewees actually, actually said when she was speaking with us. She said, you know, Right now it might be us Chinese that’s suffering, but sooner or later Americans and people from other countries will suffer the consequences as well. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Investigative reporter with the Associated Press. Dave Kang, thanks so much for joining us.

 

KANG: Thanks so much for having me.