(TibetanReview.net, Jun01’26) – China, which tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. Calling it a Mao-era policing on steroids, a New York Times report May 31 says that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian states and weak democracies across the world.
Thanks to the effectiveness of its surveillance measures, China casts itself as a model of policing, pointing to its low rate of violent crime. But the same apparatus that keeps citizens safe is also routinely used to crush dissent.
Movement is monitored by a network of surveillance cameras, many equipped with AI software that recognises faces and the way a person walks.
In addition, China has also been subjecting its minority populations to biometric data harvesting — DNA samples, iris scans and voice-pattern samples. The police have visited the homes of minority groups to promote party policies. Companies must register their employees in police databases, the report noted.
President Xi Jinping is stated to call the system the “Fengqiao experience for a new era” — a reference to a town in eastern China that was notorious during the Mao era for encouraging neighbours to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies. Xi wants to embed the party and its security apparatus so deeply in daily life that no trouble, however minor or apolitical, can arise, the report said.
And now, after decades of perfecting a surveillance state at home, China is exporting its ideology of state control — and the technology to enforce it.
Beijing’s pitch is stated to have appealed to many authoritarian and weak democratic states in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia, where leaders have welcomed the opportunity to use China’s assistance to entrench their power.
Since 2000, China has held nearly 900 police-training sessions for at least 138 countries, the report said, citing the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It has embedded its officers in police forces in the Central African Republic, Vanuatu and Kiribati. It provided thousands of surveillance cameras to Ecuador in 2011, enabling the country’s domestic intelligence agency to better monitor political opponents.
And it trained a unit of South African police in 2016 that was later deployed to intimidate and assassinate political rivals of then-President Jacob Zuma, the report said, citing the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Washington-based organisation that is part of the US Department of Defence.
Exporting police training “allows China to portray their system as a public safety success rather than a human rights failure,” Sheena Chestnut Greitens, who co-authored the Carnegie study, has said.
Solomon Islands signed a security pact with Beijing in 2022. Under it, Chinese officers man the country’s police force. The 10 or so members of the Chinese police team sent to the Solomon Islands have been held up by Chinese state propaganda as an example of Beijing’s benevolence toward its neighbours.
But when news emerged that the Chinese police team had proposed collecting biometric data of the Islands’ citizens, a backlash began.
The Fengqiao model’s emphasis on monitoring and coercion threatened social harmony and local customs, such as having village chiefs resolve disputes, Celsus Talifilu, a prominent political figure, has written in a blog post, arguing that the police had no authority to collect vast amounts of personal information, register biometric data, or conduct neighbourhood surveillance.
In the end, the Fengqiao pilot programme in a village where it was to be implemented was suspended. No biometric data was ever collected. And this month, the Solomon Islands elected a new prime minister more sceptical of Beijing, the report said.