Opinion | China's New AI Surveillance System Has A Chilling New Mission

China's sweeping new law on "ethnic unity", which takes effect on Wednesday, has raised fears among the country's minority groups that it will further erode their culture and rights. The law also allows Beijing to target people overseas, prompting concern in Taiwan and many other parts of the world, including India, which hosts the largest Tibetan community outside China. The move is seen as the latest tool in Beijing's arsenal to suppress its minorities and dissidents. This comes amid growing evidence that China is using advanced AI not only to target its current critics but also to predict who could become one in the future.

The Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion legislation was approved by China's National People's Congress in Beijing in March, with the stated aim of creating a "shared" national identity among the country's officially recognised 56 ethnic groups. However, the main focus appears to be assimilating minorities into the culture of the majority Han Chinese. The law mandates that Mandarin be the language of instruction in schools and official communication. It also provides a legal basis for prosecuting parents or guardians who may instil what it describes as "detrimental" views in children.

Fulfilling Xi's Vision

The new law cements President Xi Jinping's vision of a powerful China united by a single national identity. Under his rule, Beijing has already taken a harder line on dissent and protests, especially in Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, home to minority groups. In 2020, ethnic Mongolians in northern China staged rare protests against measures to reduce Mongolian-language instruction in favour of Mandarin. In Xinjiang, human rights groups have documented the detention of a million Uyghur Muslims in what Beijing calls "re-education" camps. In 2022, a UN report accused China of crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, including torture and forced sterilisation of Uyghurs. Beijing dismissed the report as "pure farce" and a tool to smear and slander China.

In Tibet, Buddhists are not permitted to worship their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who will turn 91 this week. Their monasteries are now controlled by the Chinese authorities, and children are reported to have been sent to state-run boarding schools to be educated predominantly in Mandarin and to inculcate Chinese culture. Speaking in New Delhi, the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Penpa Tsering, condemned China's new law as "an instrument of forced assimilation, whose ultimate objective is the gradual erosion of Tibetan language, religion, culture and identity".

Beijing has defended the new legislation, which puts even foreign citizens' lives at risk. Under Article 63 of the law, people outside China can be held legally accountable for undermining "ethnic unity and progress or inciting ethnic separatism". 

Beijing's Vice Justice Minister, Hu Weilie, said the law was "legitimate", "lawful" and "necessary". He said the overseas provision had been misinterpreted. However, Taiwan, the UN and the European Union remain unconvinced and have expressed deep concern. In Taipei, an official feared the new law could be used to prosecute the Taiwanese as well as Hong Kongers living in Taiwan who oppose unification. Australia, which has a large Chinese community, has also registered its concern with Beijing.

The Case Of Secret "Police Stations"

Even without the new law, Beijing had been accused of targeting its dissidents in foreign countries through a network of shadow police stations. In May, a Chinese-origin American citizen, Lu Jianwang, was convicted in New York of helping run the first known secret police station in the US. The court found he operated the station in Manhattan's Chinatown in early 2022 for China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS). He was accused of targeting Chinese dissidents, including Xi Jie, a pro-Democracy activist who fled his country in 2013.

In recent months, France has dismantled nine clandestine police stations operated by Chinese nationals on behalf of their government, according to the French interior ministry. These stations were used to monitor the Chinese diaspora, track down government critics, and forcibly send them back to China. Early in June, two Chinese men were jailed in London for running "shadow police operations" on British soil. The court heard that they assisted in efforts to track down and forcibly return Hong Kong nationals living in Britain.

 At least 100 such stations have been reported in more than 50 countries, with rights groups accusing China of using the outposts to threaten and monitor Chinese nationals abroad as well as helping Beijing identify pro-democracy activists living in the US. China has denied that the outposts are police stations, saying they are "service stations" providing administrative services to nationals overseas.

Finding Future Dissenters

In the 2022 Tom Cruise-starring Hollywood film Minority Report, police identify "criminals" for arrest before they have actually committed a murder. Little did the producers know that it would come close to reality, thanks to China's sustained efforts to achieve mastery in Artificial Intelligence. Leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked company have revealed that Beijing is now trying to develop technology to predict who might become a dissident.

Researchers at the US university Vanderbilt have recently found that the Chinese firm Geedge Networks is analysing vast amounts of data on individuals' daily habits, relationships, and browsing histories to predict who might say or do something critical of the government. The company already sells a commercial version of the Great Firewall, the surveillance and censorship software that China uses to control online activity. Geedge is a private company that operates in coordination with the Chinese government. It has already sold its surveillance software to Pakistan, Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia. This "reflects longstanding concerns about covert access to personal data from Chinese telecommunications and digital infrastructure abroad", say Vanderbilt researchers.

There is no evidence that Geedge has mastered and deployed the predictive technology. One reason is export controls imposed by the US under President Biden. But Trump has relaxed those controls and recent developments suggest Beijing is working overtime to acquire the latest AI technology. Last week, another Chinese cybersecurity firm, Qihoo360, claimed it had built an AI system matching the capabilities of Anthropic's Mythos, the most powerful American AI technology. Mythos can uncover thousands of previously unknown bugs in software and exploit them. The White House has restricted its distribution amid fears of misuse by rivals and hackers.

No Hiding From AI Surveillance

There is no doubt that China is keen to deploy predictive behaviour surveillance against its citizens and will also export the technology to its friends, such as Pakistan. It is also true that the US and other powers are harvesting data to be used against their citizens, and one can't rule out their attempts at predictive surveillance. But Beijing is doing so on a different scale and with greater vigour. Early in June, Beijing hosted an international police and anti-terrorism technology expo to showcase its law-enforcement equipment. According to the South China Morning Post, a company at the expo, Lianxin Technology, said its AI-enabled cameras and psychological analysis use facial features to generate personality profiles. The company claims that if a person looks at the camera for 8 to 12 seconds, the system will generate a personality profile that includes emotional stability, health vulnerability, core motivations and the risk of committing a crime. It's not quite predictive technology yet, but some progress is evident.

Although China's security forces have been deploying facial recognition and other modern technologies for years, their use of AI-enabled technology serves as a warning to critics of the Chinese regime. The ethnic unity law will be enforced using these technologies. China's dissidents or critics have no hiding place from the state's surveillance net. The new law will certainly make the lives of Chinese dissidents or minorities more difficult. It will at least serve as a deterrent by exerting psychological pressure on them, even if Beijing is unable to secure their extradition.

The new law also requires parents from the country's ethnic minorities to educate and guide their children to love the Chinese Communist Party. For Xi, the party is supreme and loyalty is non-negotiable. Two weeks ago, the country's top military decision-makers completed a course for senior officers, aimed at their ideological transformation and political rectification. Speaking at the launch of the two-month course in April, Xi said that joining the military required a firm embrace of Marxism and loyalty to the party's beliefs, organisation and cause. In an apparent attempt to clarify, a commentary in the country's official China Defence News warned that keeping the Chinese army "pure" is fundamental to its core mission. To maintain purity, the journal stressed, loyalty to the party must be "exclusive, absolute and unconditional."

(Naresh Kaushik is a former editor at the BBC and Associated Press. He is based in London.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author