Which companies equip Beijing with digital surveillance
Numerous leading high-tech companies are involved in monitoring Uyghurs in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. The fact that facial recognition, motion control and DNA analysis work so efficiently at all is due to the rapid advance of Chinese technology companies. They work with zeal and capital on the necessary hardware and software and readily deliver them for government-controlled use against minorities.
The Xinjiang region is being treated by Beijing as a gigantic test area for digital surveillance. Thus, the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reports in a recently published report that China's high-tech surveillance state has led to many of the minorities there no longer going to daily prayer out of fear. Around 1000-square mosques in a southern district of Xinjiang are constantly monitored by video cameras, according to USCIRF.
Facial recognition systems have been used throughout the northwest region of the country, which, in addition to facial recognition, simultaneously classify the scanned faces by skin tone and facial shape. According to USCIRF, the data obtained is even used by Chinese police outside Xinjiang to "identify and visualize Uyghurs".
Support directly from the State Treasury
Chinese technology companies that allow surveillance in Xinjiang include the manufacturer of surveillance cameras Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, as well as the facial recognition systems of CloudWalk and SenseNets Technology, which according to the report are daily routes of more than 2, Follow five million people in Xinjiang.
Most of the money that led to the rise of these companies comes directly from the Treasury. In Hikvision, the world's largest manufacturer of surveillance cameras, for example, the state has the majority share of 51 percent. The New York Times reported in the spring that Hikvision uses racist facial recognition against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The danger is that Hikvision, according to its own information, not only develops the core technologies of audio and video coding, but also the data storage associated with video image processing, as well as forward-looking technologies such as cloud computing, big data and deep learning. First, they turn control technology into a powerful weapon.
Another company, iFlytek, has been working with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to build a national language model database that "knows minority languages", according to USCIRF.
Foreign companies also involved
However, it is not only Chinese companies that benefit from China's growing digital authoritarianism, not only in Xinjiang. For example, Thermo Fisher Scientific withdrew from the sale of DNA sequencers to the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang only after criticism by the US Congress and human rights groups.
Using these devices, DNA samples and other biometric data such as fingerprints and blood samples of Uyghurs between twelve to 65 years old were collected at police stations and in the numerous retraining camps, according to USCIRF in his September report.
Following recent revelations about the internment of Muslim Uyghurs in China, Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) urged the Beijing government to provide information. "China must fulfil its international commitments on human rights," he said Tuesday at the Berlin Forum on Foreign Policy of the Body Foundation in Berlin. It is now primarily a question of independent access to the region inhabited by the Uighurs, including for the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations. "If indeed hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are held in camps, the international community cannot turn a blind eye to this," stressed Maas.
Even without the Leak "China Cables", which became known at the beginning of the week, it was known that in China Uyghurs and members of other religious minorities in Xinjiang Province are arbitrarily detained, guarded step by step and held against their will in detention camps. Their freedom of movement has been extremely restricted for years. Chinese officials have installed a GPS transmitter on every vehicle of an Uyghur. GPS or spying software in Uyghur telephones are rather ancient means of surveillance. The new technologies are based on artificial intelligence and thus on the area in which the start-ups from China have become the world leader.
Zimbabwe orders facial recognition software
China is now exporting the model to other countries. The Malaysian police have ordered facial recognition technology from Yitu. Robert Mugabe's successor Emmerson Mnangagwa had already signed a contract with the Cloudwalk start-up to equip Zimbabwe with facial recognition software. [In an earlier version of the text, Robert Mugabe also concluded the contract. Cloudwalk can thus feed more data into its still flawed algorithms for people with dark skin color.
In October, the US blacklisted companies such as Yitu, Hikvision, iFlytek and warned that the technology of these companies violates the human rights of Uyghur minorities. In addition to CloudWalk, Face ++ and SenseTime, Yitu is one of four Unicorns in the field of Computer Vision (a sub-area of the CI that extracts information from visual data), all fighting for the pioneering role in security surveillance, but also in robotics, finance or transport. SenseTime, the most valuable KI start-up in the world, is also said to be worth 4,5 billion dollars by international investors. By 2030's Beijing wants to be the world leader in artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues to practice censorship of the Chinese Cables. Asked about this, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Monday that it was "mean" and "clumsy" attempts by foreign media to make the subject bigger than it is. China will not accept the destruction of China's anti-terrorism and demarcation work.(徳囯ASK电容器)