(TibetanReview.net, Sep10’25) – US tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state over the past quarter century, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an investigation by the Associated Press (AP) has found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the US Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States, reported the AP Sep 8.
Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them, the report said.
US companies did this by bringing “predictive policing” to China — technology that sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their behaviour. But they also allow Chinese police to threaten friends and family of such people and pre-emptively detain them for crimes they have not even committed, the report said.
By way of example, the report cites the case of a Chinese defence contractor called Huadi, who worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield” for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome. This finding is based on thousands of pages of classified government blueprints taken out of China by a whistleblower, verified by the AP which has revealed it for the first time.
The report noted that across the PRC, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.
Some tech companies are found to have even specifically addressed people’s racial identity in their marketing. Dell and a Chinese surveillance firm promoted a “military-grade” AI-powered laptop with “all-race recognition” on Dell’s official WeChat account in 2019. And until contacted by AP in August, biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific’s website marketed DNA kits to the Chinese police as “designed” for the Chinese population, including “ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans,” the report said.
And while the flood of American technology slowed considerably starting in 2019 after outrage and sanctions over atrocities in Xinjiang, it laid the foundation for China’s surveillance apparatus that Chinese companies have since built on and in some cases replaced. To this day, concerns remain over where technology sold to China will end up, the report said.
NVIDIA has claimed it does not make surveillance systems or software, does not work with police in China and has not designed the H20 for police surveillance. However, it posted on its WeChat social media account in 2022 that Chinese surveillance firms Watrix and GEOAI used its chips to train AI patrol drones and systems to identify people by their walk, while telling the AP those relationships no longer continue, the report noted.
On the other hand, Thermo Fisher and computer hard drive maker Seagate promoted their products to Chinese police at conferences and trade shows this year, the report said, citing online posts. Officers stroll the streets of Beijing with Motorola walkie talkies. NVIDIA and Intel chips remain critical for Chinese policing systems, procurements were stated to show. And contracts to maintain existing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft software and gear remain ubiquitous, often hidden behind third parties, the report said.
As the capacity and sophistication of such technologies has grown, so has their reach. Surveillance technologies now include AI systems that help track and detain migrants in the US and identify people to kill in the Israel-Hamas war. China, in the meantime, has used what it learned from the US to turn itself into a surveillance superpower, selling technologies to countries like Iran and Russia, the report said.
AP says its investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company; tens of thousands of pages of confidential corporate and government documents; public Chinese language marketing material; and thousands of procurements, many provided by ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the non-profit Asia Society. The AP also drew from dozens of open record requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former Chinese and American engineers, executives, experts, officials, administrators, and police officers.
The report said that though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate were stated to show. Their sales pitches — made both publicly and privately — cited Communist Party catchphrases on crushing protest, including “stability maintenance,” “key persons,” and “abnormal gatherings,” and named programs that stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes” and the “Golden Shield,” the report noted.
Other companies, like Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, creator of mapping software ArcGIS Esri, and what was then Hewlett Packard, or HP, were also found to have also sold technology or services knowingly to Chinese police or surveillance companies. Four practicing lawyers have said sales like those uncovered by AP could potentially go against at least the spirit, if not the letter, of US export laws at the time, which the companies denied.