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The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home and exporting these technologies abroad. [The study focuses on] Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications provider, which is partly state-owned and increasingly regarded as an instrument of its foreign policy.
The transfers [of technology between China and foreign countries] have sparked widespread concern among observers. These tools of digital dictatorship, many argue, will let recipient governments expand surveillance and reinforce the wave of autocratic retrenchment and democratic erosion currently underway.
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The [foreign] governments that receive Huawei transfers are systematically different than those that do not, and in ways that may be correlated with state repression.
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The Chinese Communist Party's Surveillance State
The Information Age has revolutionized surveillance in the world’s autocracies. In 1998, the CCP launched the Golden Shield Project, which [one researcher] describes as “a domestic surveillance and filtering system that integrates online government databases with an all-encompassing surveillance network.”Footnote 3 In the first phase, completed in 2005, the CCP built a massive network of population databases, ID tracking systems, and internet surveillance tools, which let it record the movement of potential dissidents as revealed, in part, by their online behavior. In 2017, the CCP announced the completion of its “Sky Net” program, which entails 176 million surveillance cameras across China and plans for 626 million by 2020, nearly one camera for every two citizens (Hersey Reference Hersey2017; Russell Reference Russell2017). The result, Qiang (Reference Qiang2019) writes, is “the largest video-surveillance network in the world.”
Simultaneously, the CCP built a facial database that encompassed every adult citizen [...] and a DNA database [...]. The CCP’s facial recognition technology is employed for check-in and security at airports [...] train stations [...] and hotels [...].. In 2017, the CCP applied facial recognition technology to detect jaywalkers, with offenders notified via text message and their pictures displayed at major intersections [...]. This pervasive surveillance apparatus lets the CCP repress dissidents and spend less on public goods [...]. It also complements more analog forms of repression, such as informants and hired thugs [...]. Digital surveillance [in China] is now a conspicuous feature of everyday life.
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The CCP’s digital surveillance apparatus is supported by a network of domestic technology firms, which are subsidized by the state and routinely used as instruments of foreign policy**. The most general are Huawei and ZTE. Huawei is the world’s largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment [...], and especially dominant in Africa, where it has provided 70% of the 5G network.
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China has a number of more focused technology firms that are implicated in surveillance. Several of these specialize in video cameras and facial recognition software: Hikvision, Dahua, CloudWalk, Megvii, YITU, and SenseTime, most notably. Of these, Hikvision is perhaps the most consequential. In 2019, it was responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s surveillance cameras [...].Dahua has also supplied cameras for Safe City projects, so called for their use of digital surveillance to support the local security apparatus [...]. Other firms specialize in still different areas of surveillance. Meiya Pico reportedly built an app used by the Chinese government to extract data from citizens’ smartphones during street checks [...]. iFlytek develops voice recognition software [...].
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Huawei transfers are [...] more likely if the recipient government has a preexisting relationship with Beijing. The effects of these transfers [...] depend on political institutions in recipient countries. In autocracies, where the chief political threat to incumbents is collective action by citizens and institutional oversight is weak, Huawei transfers lead to an expansion of digital surveillance, internet shutdowns, internet filtering, and targeted arrests for online content. In democracies, where governments have stronger incentivizes to provide public goods, institutional oversight is stronger, and civil societies are more vibrant, Huawei transfers have no clear or consistent effect on digital repression.
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Since Huawei is secretive about its contracts, our statistical estimates may be subject to measurement error. Huawei contracts, like other Chinese infrastructure contracts, routinely include confidentiality clauses [...], which prohibit recipient governments from divulging information about them. Consequently, our record of Huawei transfers may be incomplete, which would effectively include some treated countries in the control group. Since this would bias against our key results, our statistical estimates should be regarded as lower bounds, with the actual effect potentially larger. Third, Huawei’s secrecy means that we also lack fine-grained data about what its transfers entail.
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Transfers that entail “Safe City” infrastructure, for instance, are almost certainly more likely to facilitate digital repression than contracts that focus on IT training for university students. Likewise, Huawei may be inclined to provide some recipient governments more direct personnel support than others, helping them overcome state capacity limitations that might otherwise prevent them from using technology transfers for digital repression.
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