Zhuang women

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Last week, The New York Times launched The Privacy Project, a major, months-long examination of privacy issues in the U.S. and in general. Among the first wave of articles was an op-ed by author Jianan Qian on the Chinese public’s responses to surveillance technologies like the facial recognition systems operating in Xinjiang and beyond.

I came to the United States for a master’s degree in 2016, and I am not sure whether the experience of living overseas has increased my sensitivity about matters of privacy or not. I do remember waking up one morning in 2017 to a story that had gone viral in my WeChat feeds overnight: “A BBC reporter challenged China’s surveillance network — and it took only seven minutes to capture him!” I couldn’t tell which terrified me more: China’s all-encompassing network of facial recognition surveillance cameras, or that my countrymen were proudly cheering them on.

[…] Many people in China seem to be happy about the physical security promised by the surveillance network. Our mind-set, long ago, was wired to see safety and freedom as an either-or choice. I remember a conversation I had during my first year in the United States, when I was visiting Chicago. A Chinese student told me he dared not walk alone in the city after 5 p.m. When I told him I’d recently taken a trip to a nearby 7-Eleven at 10 p.m. by myself to get a beer, he was shocked. “Why?” I asked him. “It’s a safe neighborhood.” Still pale, he said, “You only got lucky.”

[…] The other reason that my people seem not to worry about the violation of their privacy is that they believe they are law-abiding citizens. “Only criminals need to be afraid,” they say. But I’ve heard other stories.

In 2018, Wang Qian, a young single mother from Zhejiang Province, hanged herself after she lost her savings on a peer-to-peer lending platform called PPMiao. In her suicide note, which briefly appeared on social media, she confessed her frustrations: Because she’d been a victim of a financial fraud — and therefore had grievances — she was now considered a threat to public safety and order. [Source]

Huawei’s Hong-Eng Ko put the public safety argument more bluntly this week, arguing that “if privacy wins, criminals win.” The acceptance Qian describes is mirrored in widespread public support for China’s various emerging social credit systems as mechanisms of accountability for untrustworthy behavior, as found by Genia Kostka through surveys and Manya Koetse through analysis of social media discussion. Social credit scholar Shazeda Ahmed also touched on the issue in a recent examination of the ecosystem at Logic magazine, noting that “although a few Chinese consumer protection organizations have become attuned to the ways that tech firms’ use of customer data can lead to privacy abuses, they have not taken up the issue of blacklists because the practice is treated as socially acceptable in China. […] People who are wholly unaffected by blacklists may view them favorably, as proof that the government is proactively combating the laolai phenomenon [i.e. “people who have the means to repay debt they owe but choose not to”]. Yet there needs to be a critical analysis of the social credit system that centers the perspectives of those who are most directly affected.”

Ahmed previously examined broader privacy issues in China in a ChinaFile piece with her MERICs colleague Bertram Lang, noting that public attitudes are more mixed when it comes to corporations rather than the government. Baidu CEO Robin Li’s claim that Chinese people are happy to trade privacy for convenience sparked angry responses last year, for example, and there have been persistent concerns about data collection by Chinese tech giants’ apps. In a recent review of lessons drawn from the first year of compiling his ChinAI Newsletter, Oxford University’s Jeffrey Ding also argued that the public mood regarding privacy and AI technologies such as facial recognition is more mixed than often believed:

Chinese people — including regular netizens, data protection officers, philosophy professors — care about AI-related ethics issues, including privacy. Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction that there are no discussions of AI ethics happening in China. It is perfectly reasonable to highlight differences in Chinese notions of AI ethics or the degree to which privacy is important to Chinese consumers, but it is absolutely dehumanizing to say Chinese people don’t care about privacy.

Chinese tech giants clash fight over user privacy violations, as evidenced by Tencent asking the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to intervene in a dispute between Tencent and Huawei on alleged user privacy infringements of the Honor Magic phone. After a yearlong investigation, China’s Shandong Province brought a major case in July of 2018 on infringements of personal information against 57 individuals and 11 big data companies, which revealed a debate over how to interpret a new national personal information protection specification. The Nandu Personal Information Protection Research Center has assessed 1550 websites and apps for the transparency of their privacy policies.

Finally, Chinese thinkers are engaged on broader issues of AI ethics, including the risks of human-level machine intelligence and beyond. Zhao Tingyang, an influential philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has written a long essay on near-term and long-term AI safety issues, including the prospect of superintelligence. Professor Zhihua Zhou, who leads an impressive lab at Nanjing University, argued in an article for the China Computer Federation that even if strong AI is possible, it is something that AI researchers should stay away from. [Source]

Recent reports on a more mundane system monitoring street cleaners in one Nanjing district demonstrated public unease with surveillance of ordinary citizens, rather than criminal suspects. From Masha Borak at Abacus:

“We’re on this road working, and it positions us. You’re here 20 minutes without moving, and it knows it.”

This is how a street cleaner in one Chinese city introduced a new piece of surveillance equipment that the local sanitation company slapped on her wrist to track her work. The smartwatch doesn’t just track her position. Staying 20 minutes in one place sounds an alarm: “Add oil!” the watch chants, using a popular Chinese phrase of encouragement.

[…] If workers fail to move after the alarm goes off, the team leaders can look up their GPS location on the screen and go out to find them, one worker said.

[…] In 2018, Amazon filed two patents for a wristband that tracks warehouse employees and monitors performance. While Amazon has described it as time-saving, those acquainted with the work conditions in its warehouses may see it as dystopian.

Judging from the online backlash to Nanjing’s new smartwatch initiative, many in China share a similar sentiment. The reactions have been overwhelmingly negative, with one Weibo commentator calling the smartwatches “the shackles of the working people.”

“You can monitor suspects, addicts, or production, but why ‘monitor’ hard-working sanitation staff?,” another Weibo commentator asked. [Source]

SupChina’s Jiayun Feng collected several more examples of negative reactions. At What’s On Weibo, Gabi Verberg wrote that the watches’ alarms had been deactivated in response to online criticism:

On Weibo, the hashtag “Smartwatch Automatically Yells ‘Jiayou’” (#智能手表自动喊加油#) received over 2,5 million views, with the majority of commenters strongly rejecting the new approach.

Most commenters on this issue argued that the implementation of the smartwatch is “immoral” and that the Nanjing workers are “treated as criminals.” Many others also pointed out that the workers, often senior citizens, should be able to rest for more than 20 minutes.

In light of the new policy, many people on social media also referred to the infamous fictional character Zhou “Bapi” (周扒皮). In the novel The Killing Wind, this landlord Zhou would stick his head into the henhouse stirring up the roosters to wake his laborers up earlier, so they would start working.

Some netizens came with an alternative solution, suggesting that the leaders of the company should wear the smartwatches themselves instead. [Source]

Sanitation workers' wages are low, working hours are long and arduous. Very often, the only people willing to take these jobs are poorly educated elderly workers who cannot find employment elsewhere and they lack proper pensions and insurance. Read more: https://t.co/bTkF7GOnoZ pic.twitter.com/edVnyHs6HH

— CLB (@chinalabour) April 17, 2019

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Post tags: facial recognition, Nanjing, privacy, public opinion, social credit system, surveillance
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Concerns over the growing international acceptance of the “China model” of internet control–a trend that was a main focus of Freedom House’s annual “Freedom on the Net” report last November–have lately been on the rise. Analysts have warned of a “digital iron curtain” separating Washington’s and Beijing’s emerging spheres of global tech influence and competing approaches to internet governance and digital rights, and a growing number of countries–including India, Russia, Vietnam, and most recently, Thailand–have been noted to be eagerly adopting Beijing’s model of internet control. At Bloomberg, Lulu Yilun Chen and Yoolim Lee report on the trend as a “new Cold War” in which Washington is currently losing ground as autocratic regimes around the world become increasingly enticed by Beijing’s approach:

The more free-wheeling Silicon Valley model once seemed unquestionably the best approach, with stars from Google to Facebook to vouch for its superiority. Now, a re-molding of the internet into a tightly controlled and scrubbed sphere in China’s image is taking place from Russia to India. Yet it’s Southeast Asia that’s the economic and geopolitical linchpin to Chinese ambitions and where U.S.-Chinese tensions will come to a head: a region home to more than half a billion people whose internet economy is expected to triple to $240 billion by 2025.

“For authoritarian countries in general, the idea of the state being able to wall off to some extent its internet is deeply appealing,” said Howard French, author of “Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power. “This is about the regimes’ survival in an authoritarian situation. So that’s why they like to do this. They want to be able to insulate themselves against shocks.”

[…] The crux of a Chinese internet model is data sovereignty: information of citizens must be stored in-country and accessible on demand to the authorities, a concept enshrined in Chinese law since 2017. That’s raising hackles in Washington, which aims to counter Beijing’s sway — a longer-term struggle that may be the single most important episode in world affairs since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Escalating tensions between the two richest economies will impact just about every country across the planet — economically and socially.

[…] “The most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America,” the former Google chief [Eric Schmidt] executive reportedly told a private venture capital gathering in September. “Globalization means that they get to play too.”[Source]

At the South China Morning Post, Zheping Huang wonders if Western countries–who are currently struggling to find new ways to regulate internet giants that have allowed the manipulation of elections, the live-streaming of violent terrorism, and the proliferation of expressions of pedophilia—might eventually adopt some of Beijing’s methods themselves. Huang then continues to list eight “tools” that China has pioneered for internet control, including the Great Firewall, the regular use of targeted content bans, human content moderators, and the ideology of data sovereignty:

Governments around the world are scrambling to hold internet companies accountable for what is published on their platforms amid renewed fears about the spread of harmful content on social media. Last month Facebook enabled an Australian gunman to live stream a mass shooting that left 50 people dead in New Zealand. Though the account was quickly shut down, a video of the massacre circulated online, raising concerns about the consequences of a largely unfettered internet.

In recent weeks, governments in countries including the UK and Singapore have moved to take a more active role in defining the boundaries of acceptable online discourse. Lawmakers in Australia, for example, passed a sweeping law to punish tech giants like Facebook and Twitter if they fail to remove inappropriate material from their platforms “expeditiously”.

All of this will sound familiar to China. The Chinese government runs the world’s most sophisticated censorship machine, powered by a combination of laws, technology, and human scrutiny. While the West is extremely unlikely to adopt China’s model wholesale – there may be some tools that can be adapted. Here’s a look at some of them. […] [Source]

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Post tags: censorship, global influence, Great Firewall, ideology, internet sovereignty, it companies, tech companies
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This year marks the 30th anniversary of the nationwide, student-led democracy movement in China, and the subsequent military crackdown in Beijing. To mark the occasion, CDT is posting a series of original news articles from that year, beginning with the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15 and continuing through the tumultuous spring. Read the full series here or follow it on Twitter.

From the April 19, 1989 New York Times:

More than 10,000 people took over Beijing’s central square on Tuesday night in a rally for democracy. Several thousand students then marched to the Communist Party headquarters, where those in the front of the crowd tried to force their way in to see the nation’s leaders.

For several hours early today, the students engaged in a shoving match with startled guards who were blocking the entrance to the walled Zhongnanhai compound, where most of China’s leaders live and work.

The activities were the culmination of several days in which students mourning the death of Hu Yaobang, the ousted Communist Party leader, turned their efforts into a campaign for broad social change. Mr. Hu, who died Saturday, was forced to resign after student demonstrations in December 1986 and January 1987.

[…] The defiance ended at 4:30 A.M., when at least 1,000 police officers arrived to clear the area. The number of students had dwindled by then to 1,000, and they left quietly. No students were publicly arrested, and the police seemed to be trying to use as little force as possible. [Source]

April 19, 1989 – Students stage evening sit-in at main gate to Zhongnanhai, shouting “Li Peng come out!” pic.twitter.com/KLhqmguT18

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) April 19, 2014

[This series was originally posted by CDT in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the protests. If you have access to additional sources of original reporting, video, accounts or photos from the spring of 1989, please send them to us at cdt@chinadigitaltimes.net and we’ll consider including them in this series. Many thanks.]

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Post tags: 1989 protests, 1989 timeline series, hu yaobang
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