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Asia Pacific

SUBSCRIBE FOR €0.50/WEEKLog in
Friday, March 22, 2024
Today’s Paper
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Asia Pacific|Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding
Surveillance State

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/world/asia/china-surveillance-investigation.html
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Visual Investigations


FOUR TAKEAWAYS FROM A TIMES INVESTIGATION INTO CHINA’S EXPANDING SURVEILLANCE
STATE

Times reporters spent over a year combing through government bidding documents
that reveal the country’s technological road map to ensure the longevity of its
authoritarian rule.

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14:27



China’s Surveillance State Is Growing. These Documents Reveal How.
14:27

A New York Times analysis of over 100,000 government bidding documents found
that China’s ambition to collect digital and biological data from its citizens
is more expansive and invasive than previously known.

By Isabelle Qian, Muyi Xiao, Paul Mozur and Alexander Cardia

Published June 21, 2022Updated July 26, 2022
查看本文中文版

China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday
citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has
found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some
of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon
facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.

The Times’s Visual Investigations team and reporters in Asia spent over a year
analyzing more than a hundred thousand government bidding documents. They call
for companies to bid on the contracts to provide surveillance technology, and
include product requirements and budget size, and sometimes describe at length
the strategic thinking behind the purchases. Chinese laws stipulate that
agencies must keep records of bids and make them public, but in reality the
documents are scattered across hard-to-search web pages that are often taken
down quickly without notice. ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the Asia
Society, collected the bids and shared them exclusively with The Times.

This unprecedented access allowed The Times to study China’s surveillance
capabilities. The Chinese government’s goal is clear: designing a system to
maximize what the state can find out about a person’s identity, activities and
social connections, which could ultimately help the government maintain its
authoritarian rule.



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Here are the investigation’s major revelations.


CHINESE POLICE ANALYZE HUMAN BEHAVIORS TO ENSURE FACIAL RECOGNITION CAMERAS
CAPTURE AS MUCH ACTIVITY AS POSSIBLE.

Analysts estimate that more than half of the world’s nearly one billion
surveillance cameras are in China, but it had been difficult to gauge how they
were being used, what they captured and how much data they generated. The Times
analysis found that the police strategically chose locations to maximize the
amount of data their facial recognition cameras could collect.


Video

The Chinese government bidding documents analyzed by The Times outline the
authorities’ surveillance ambitions.CreditCredit...The New York Times

In a number of the bidding documents, the police said that they wanted to place
cameras where people go to fulfill their common needs — like eating, traveling,
shopping and entertainment. The police also wanted to install facial recognition
cameras inside private spaces, like residential buildings, karaoke lounges and
hotels. In one instance, the investigation found that the police in the city of
Fuzhou in the southeast province of Fujian wanted to install a camera inside the
lobby of a franchise location of the American hotel brand Days Inn. The hotel’s
front desk manager told The Times that the camera did not have facial
recognition capabilities and was not feeding videos into the police network.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.



Isabelle Qian is a video journalist covering China for The Times. More about
Isabelle Qian

Muyi Xiao is reporter on the Visual Investigations team, which combines
traditional reporting with advanced digital forensics. She has been covering
China for the past decade. More about Muyi Xiao

Paul Mozur is the global technology correspondent for The Times, based in
Taipei. Previously he wrote about technology and politics in Asia from Hong
Kong, Shanghai and Seoul. More about Paul Mozur

Alexander Cardia is a designer, animator and graphics editor with the Visual
Investigations team at The Times. He was among the recipients of the 2023
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of Russian atrocities in
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A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2022, Section A, Page 10
of the New York edition with the headline: China’s Expanding Surveillance State.
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