China’s latest technological innovations dovetail all too neatly with its anti-democratic practices. As has widely been reported, Beijing exploits tech to surveil and spy on its citizens, publicly shame those who owe debt or commit minor infractions such as jaywalking, implement social credit score systems, and censor dissent.
Now, per a harrowing yet hardly surprising new report: “Patent applications belonging to Huawei and a group of China-based artificial intelligence companies” have been filed for technology that can be deployed to detect Uyghur Muslims.
Back in 2019, secret documents detailed the alarming depths of China’s alleged use of “widespread surveillance technology to monitor the region’s Uyghur population,” which has been identified as a repressed group by a host of global governments and now the victim of “genocide and crimes against humanity” by the U.S. government.
The Chinese regime’s technological tactics aim to usher in a “new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence,” according to an Associated Press report on the documents. By “drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology,” for instance, “computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.” The vast system “targets, surveils and grades entire ethnicities to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.”
Recent Chinese AI patent applications, meanwhile, now threaten to add a fresh, frightening capability to Beijing’s surveillance arsenal: facial recognition software that could be used to detect Uyghurs and, subsequently, to alert the authorities of their movements and activities.
Such actions underscore the regime’s commitment to its goal of “algorithmic governance.” In addition to its “sweeping effort to eradicate online political content,” Beijing has banned “everything from tattoos to religious proselytizing, violations of ‘mainstream values,’ flirtatious dancing, images of leaders, and Western political critiques.” China’s aggressive use of technology is a harbinger of the type of harm that could follow if foreign nations, with values diametrically opposed to ours, succeed in spreading a vision for a closed internet to countries around the world.
In stark contrast to China, America’s approach to technology has been fundamentally infused with our country’s values, values including openness, expression, free enterprise, and freedom from government censorship. Those values are worth fighting for. If we fail to defend our vision, in word and policy, a future like China’s could become reality. The Chinese seek to dominate the internet and, with it, citizen access to information. But Beijing’s dystopian ambitions would quickly amount to a national nightmare for any nation governed by China’s technological rules and policies.
Essential to the protection of our values are regulatory and trade policies that are hospitable to tech innovators as they compete in the global marketplace. With a new congressional session and administration, people in the U.S. want to see lawmakers work together on a bipartisan basis. A smart policy approach around which Republicans and Democrats can rally would seek to strengthen the work of those who help underpin our open, accessible internet, rather than those who wish to undermine it. At stake is whether the world’s increasingly sophisticated tech innovations will be harnessed to connect consumers, customers, and citizens — or misused and taken advantage of to control them.
The preservation of America’s technological competitive advantage must rightfully be recognized by policymakers as a pressing priority, not merely for the products it generates, but for the principles it guards.
Bradley A. Smith is chairman of the Institute for Free Speech, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and a member of the board of directors of the American Edge Project.
