A demonstrator wears a mask painted with the colors of the flag of East Turkestan and a hand bearing the colors of the Chinese flag as she joins supporters of China’s Muslim Uighur minority and Turkish nationalists during a protest in front of the Chinese consulate in Istanbul on October 1, 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of The People’s Republic of China.

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Didi Kirsten TatlowJohn Feng

By Didi Kirsten Tatlow and John Feng

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China Decoded is Newsweek’s in-depth newsletter about China’s growing influence on the world. It goes beyond the headlines to examine how Beijing thinks, how its policies travel beyond China’s borders, and what they mean for the United States and its allies. Readers can sign up for China Decoded here to receive each edition directly in their inbox.

The newsletter is written by journalists with deep experience covering China. Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Senior Correspondent for International Affairs and Investigations, has reported extensively on Chinese politics, influence and security. John Feng, China Editor, is based in Taiwan and covers China’s domestic politics, foreign policy and the strategic competition between Beijing and Washington.

Below, for Newsweek Members, we are reproducing the latest edition of China Decoded in full:

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Feeling the Party’s Kindness

The Communist Party’s quest to surveil and control the people of China may be most important for it on the edges of empire, where Beijing’s presence is far away and the least logical—the vast borderlands of Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and, in a political sense, Hong Kong. The CCP wants Taiwan on that list but hasn’t succeeded yet.

That quest is girded in Orwellian language, as a new report by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) shows.

Monitoring the Frontier: Chinese Digital Surveillance Projects in Tibet, the Uyghur Region, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong, by Mishel Kondi, looks at the digital surveillance deployed by the Ministry of Public Security and other parts of China’s enormous security apparatus through the lens of more than 300,000 government and company procurement records.

The documents were located by searching for terms commonly used within the system. The following language reflects some of those terms. They are real concepts and categories and translate into things happening to people on the ground.

Let’s start with the need to “Eliminate Unseen Threats,” no doubt helped by the “Identification of Non-Han Persons Including an Independent Alarm.” (Please note my irony alert is on 11 here, meaning, it doesn’t go higher).

With “11 types and 59 kinds of key persons” needing to be watched, “Untrustworthy Persons” may require a “Become a Family Campaign.”

Don’t forget about those “Persons Who Went Abroad and Did Not Return.” Even if they want to forget you, which they probably do.

Ensuring “Four Standards for Monks and Nuns” in Tibet is easier when there are “Copper Ramparts, Iron Walls” to fall back on. Do some soul-searching; where do you fall within “Three Illegals and One Product”?

If the “Soul Casting Engineering Project” doesn’t help you to “Scrape the Bones to Remove the Poison,” try the “North Desert Camel Bell Border Patrol Team.” Or perhaps the “Internet Light Cavalry” could help.

Know, ungrateful person, that you can “Feel the Party’s Kindness and Follow the Party.” Don’t forget the “Four Emphases and Four Loves.”

But love can only go so far. Surveillance needs “No Seams, No Loopholes, No Blanks.” Not enough? “No Cracks, No Blind Spots, No Gaps.”

That’s the language and philosophy of total surveillance inserted into neat linguistic packages. It’s aimed principally at people who are classified as one or more of the “Five Poisons” (五毒), the CCP’s longstanding “us and them” framework that designates ethnic and religious minority populations as well as pro-democracy activists as existential threats and provides the ideological foundation for targeted surveillance in China, as C4ADS says.

The surveillance that the report depicts so brilliantly is only growing, which is something that people outside of China need to understand as “the organization,” as the CCP is known in China, works to introduce its “Four Global Initiatives” around the world in another major quest: to change the global order.

The initiatives are, development, security, civilization and governance, as Charles Parton writes about at the Council of Geostrategy. Certainly, not all the Orwellian measures contained by the language above will make it past China’s borders, though Transnational Repression (TNR) is growing. The primary targets of surveillance remain people inside China, in those giant peripheries, controlling which is a major priority of the CCP state, and in the Han heartland of eastern China.

Riot police detain a man as they clear protesters taking part in a rally against a new national security law in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020, on the 23rd anniversary of the city's handover from Britain to China. Hong Kong police made the first arrests under Beijing's new national security law on July 1 as the city greeted the anniversary of its handover to China with protesters fleeing water cannon.

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As a born and raised Hong Konger, I want to highlight an aspect of that surveillance courtesy of a French company, Thales, which has been making money from selling surveillance technology to the Hong Kong Police Force, according to the report.

Thales DIS Hong Kong Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary, got more than $10 million in 2021 and 2023 for supplying palm print and fingerprint identification systems to the Hong Kong Police Force, the report says.

That happened after the implementation in 2020 of sweeping state security laws that criminalized vague behaviors such as “collusion with foreign forces,” with nearly 2,000 people punished for political crimes since 2019, when democracy demonstrations shook the city. I have asked Thales for comment on their policy in dealing with repressive states but not heard back. John has more detail on the C4ADS report below.

Didi Kirsten Tatlow is Senior Correspondent, International Affairs/Investigations at Newsweek. She is based in Berlin, Germany. You can get in touch by email here.

The Data Story

Today’s data comes from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, whose research, which Kirsten reviews above, has given us a rare glimpse into the domestic and foreign supply chains enabling China’s mass surveillance of its ethnic regions as well as post-crackdown society in Hong Kong.

C4ADS reviewed 346,298 government procurement records in five Chinese administrative regions:

Analysis of the Xinjiang region—home to the predominantly Muslim Turkic ethnic group known as the Uyghurs—included tender documents for the XPCC, also known as the Bingtuan (兵团; the corps), a supragovernmental military authority that operates within the geographical boundaries of the nominally autonomous region.

Let’s pause on the Bingtuan for a moment because it’s a unique outfit—a paramilitary force, state-owned enterprise and a government entity wrapped into one—which controls over 10 percent of Xinjiang’s population and holds about 15 percent of its land through 14 military divisions and 13 cities.

“The practice of stationing garrison troops to cultivate and guard its border areas is a legacy of China’s several thousand years of history of developing and safeguarding its frontiers,” the Chinese government’s propaganda office said in a white paper in 2014 to mark the 60th anniversary of the group’s founding.

The Ughur Human Rights Project, a Washington nonprofit, calls the Bingtuan a “state within a state,” responsible for some of the worst atrocities against the native Uyghur people with its mandate to settle and secure the far-western region for over seven decades.

“The Bingtuan…oversees a brutal prison system, construction and supervision of extra-judicial internment camps, a vast surveillance network, and involuntary population transfers and forced labor,” the rights group says.

Now back to the C4ADS report…. Researchers at the think tank in Washington, D.C., identified 1,818 procurement contracts linked to digital surveillance:

Records were flagged if they contained at least two keywords that suggested the tender was for a technology or system whose primary purpose is to monitor the population. Words like “camera” and phrases like “prevention and control” were among the 165 terms used by the research team.

The tech was mostly supplied by Chinese companies located in the country’s coastal tech hubs, with police forces being the common end user, according to the report.

During the multiyear scope of the study, the authors found that Chinese security authorities had moved from traditional monitoring by CCTV to implementing systems that capture biometrics for a centralized DNA database—fingerprints, palm prints, footprints and more—as well as AI-enabled cameras that facilitate the process.

I call it a rare glimpse because Beijing rarely publicizes sensitive tender documents these days. And it’s a glimpse because the authors noticed a drop-off in public records in the latter years, suggesting either a completion of surveillance systems or a decline in disclosures.

What they did find was troubling: Western companies not only were some of the earliest suppliers of dual-use surveillance tech to China, but they also continue to sell components to the Chinese firms that have now taken over the business, despite sanctions by the U.S. and other governments.

The rise of China’s domestic tech providers in the surveillance supply chain makes sanctions a less effective tool for Western policymakers to deter rights abuses. That means China’s surveillance state may soon be too late to stop, if it isn’t already.

John Feng is Newsweek's China Editor based in Taichung, Taiwan. You can get in touch with John by email here.

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