China’s Hi-Tech Surveillance State Is Ready for Export

AlterNet | Aug 18, 2008

Democracy Now interview with Naomi Klein

By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez

With 300,000 security cameras in Beijing alone, China is at the forefront of the surveillance boom — and U.S. corporations are reaping the profits.

Juan Gonzalez: China deported five international activists [last week] for unfurling a “Free Tibet” banner over the top of an Olympic Games billboard. It’s the latest incident in what has become an almost daily crackdown on both domestic and international protesters who have had to contend with a brand new surveillance system that China set up ahead of the games. This includes 300,000 security cameras and an estimated 100,000 security officers on duty in Beijing.

But it’s not just Beijing that’s gotten a security upgrade. There are now over 600 “safe” cities in China that have received new surveillance gear. The equipment and integrated security systems will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. The domestic surveillance market in China is expected to reach $33 billion next year. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this boom are U.S. hedge funds and corporations, such as Cisco, General Electric and Google.

Amy Goodman: Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Naomi Klein calls this “McCommunism.” Her latest article published in the Huffington Post is called “The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0.” Naomi Klein is author of The Shock Doctrine. She joins us on the phone from Canada.

We’re also joined in our firehouse studio by investigative journalist and author Christian Parenti, who’s also just back from China. His latest piece for The Nation magazine is called “Class Struggle in the New China”.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Naomi Klein, let’s begin with you. Lay out what you also called in Rolling Stone the “all-seeing eye.”

Naomi Klein: Well, there’s an incredible operation going on in China to use the latest, what’s now called homeland security technology — networked surveillance cameras, biometric identification cards, facial recognition software — networking all of these cameras and running the software through it as a way to control an increasingly rebellious population. There’s an incredible statistic from 2005 that there were 87,000 mass incidents, which means protests and riots, across the country.

So it is already being used as a way to control the population and also to keep an eye on what in China is called the floating population, the migrant population, who are displaced by mega projects, who travel to cities like Beijing and Guangzhou and Shenzhen looking for work. This is a mobile population that is right now 130 million people. And this technology is used to keep track of those people, because in a sort of Maoist time in China, you had — where people stayed in their communities, you had networks of control and surveillance that were really about people snitching on their neighbors. When people are moving across long distances, the technology is replacing that. So “Police State 2.0″ is really about upgrading the surveillance system, with the help, as you said earlier, of U.S. companies like Cisco, General Electric, who have been providing these technologies.

Juan Gonzalez: Your article talks about — calls it the “Golden Shield,” as the Chinese refer to it, and you focus especially on the city of Shenzhen, in terms of the enormous reach of this. I was struck that you mentioned, for instance, that every internet cafe in China has surveillance cameras that are hooked up to local police stations so that they can keep an eye on who is using the internet cafes?

Naomi Klein: Yeah, and the internet cafes are — you know, they’re really like internet bowling alleys. They’re huge. An average-size internet cafe has 600 terminals. And there are dozens of cameras in the — not just obviously the cameras on the computers, but surveillance cameras. And this is a huge market. You mentioned that it’s worth $33 billion a year now. It’s actually — that’s even increased since I wrote that article. The latest estimate is that it’s going to be worth $43 billion, and — a year within two years.

And the reason why this is such a fast-growing market is that it’s not just that the internet cafes are installing these cameras; it’s that it’s a law now in China that they are required to install the cameras. So are at religious sites, so are entertainment sites, karaoke bars, restaurants. So, the government passes a law and says you must install these surveillance cameras, the companies comply, and then you have another set of companies who are connected to the party and also, as you said, to American companies. Many of them are listed on the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange. And they are benefiting directly from this created market, this mandated market. You must install security cameras, so no wonder this is such a fast-growing market.

Complete Interview