Is Beijing hoping to turn other authoritarian societies into digital Chinas?
China’s rise as the world’s leading exporter of surveillance technology is yielding some disturbing results. Beijing’s surveillance export packages comprise an entire technological architecture that can give governments an unprecedented ability to see, identify, and track their populations.
Those technologies include cameras, artificial intelligence, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, facial recognition, license-plate recognition, and centralized command systems. Many mid-sized countries are becoming or are already customers.
Turning Other Nations Into ‘Little Chinas’
Turkey is an important case study.
To be clear, Turkey has not yet become a Chinese-style surveillance state. Its political system and institutions remain different from China’s. That said, Chinese technology companies have established a significant presence in Turkey’s digital infrastructure, and they’re not shy about it. In fact, Huawei has explicitly marketed its AI-powered CCTV and “Safe City,” i.e. surveillance technologies, in the Turkish market.
It’s no mystery that China wants to sell as much merchandise to as many trading partners as possible. But is it also possible that China wants as many partners as possible to use and become dependent upon its surveillance technology so that their societies turn into “little Chinas” by deploying Smart City tech?
AI Camera Surveillance
The first building block is the camera.
Chinese companies such as Hikvision and Dahua have become global leaders in video-surveillance equipment. Meanwhile, Huawei has developed AI-powered cameras capable of performing sophisticated image recognition and analysis. CSIS notes that Chinese firms can provide technologies ranging from cameras to AI analytics and centralized deployment.
Huawei’s AI-enabled technology is in Turkey, using cameras with embedded AI chips and deep learning capabilities to perform recognition and identification while feeding information into cloud-based big-data systems. Such systems could operate across enormous numbers of cameras.
That represents a fundamental shift in surveillance capability for nations such as Turkey. A conventional camera records what happened. An AI camera can begin answering who, when, where, and what.
Hellbound and Down 