Every year that Xi Jinping has been president of China – starting in 2013 – he has tightened the screws further. His government has more assiduously than the year previously monitored the Chinese people – which of course makes dissent more dangerous and therefore more infrequent.
Those of us who’ve never experienced living in full out autocratic state have a hard time conjuring what it’s like. Even the Orwellian conception of Big Brother does not do what’s happening in China full justice. For China continues to take the most advanced monitoring technologies – now obviously enhanced by AI – to new levels of surveillance.
The most extreme example of Chinese repression is of the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic group of about 12 million people who live in northwest China. For more than a decade they have been forcibly “reeducated” to be assimilated. While China predictably denies “eliminating Uyghur language and culture,” the government’s own messaging contradicts the claim. What Beijing regularly and relentlessly emphasizes is “ethnic unity” and “love of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Mainstream Chinese fare better, of course. But by no means are they free of Xi’s iron fist. The government uses artificial intelligence, biometric tracking, and obligatory digital tracking to operate by far the world’s largest and most sophisticated mass surveillance network. As the New York Times put it, China’s near perfection of the surveillance state has resulted in “Mao-era policing on steroids.”
Lest you think this suffices, it does not. China is using AI to develop a predictive model. A model intended not to identify who poses a risk to the authorities today – but who will pose a risk to them tomorrow!
Sounds like sci-fi but it is not. According to researchers at Vanderbilt University, a Chinese company called Geedge Networks is developing new surveillance and censorship software that will allow the regime to predict who is likely to say or do something critical of it in the future.
So, those of us who live in a democracy that we benignly neglect better shape up. Lest we live in an autocracy that deprives us of that luxury.