China: the all-seeing eye
At the final session of the 19th Chinese Communist Party Congress, everything seems to indicate that the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, intends to further extend the government’s control over every aspect of life in China.
According to some reports in the Chinese media published in English (which you may have trouble reading if you use a VPN), the authorities are working on a project to build a huge biometric database for facial recognition of the country’s 1.3 billion inhabitants, which would allow anybody who passes one of the increasingly ubiquitous cameras located on roads and other public places to be identified within a few seconds, with 90% reliability. The project, led by the Ministry of Public Security and started in 2015, is being developed with the participation of a security company based in Shanghai.
In addition, the government could be working on other related projects: building a voice database to identify people and yet another for DNA samples. The former could be used to monitor people suspected of people trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking and other types of crime by monitoring phone calls, but it is hard to imagine it will not be used to further crack down on political dissent. And while other countries already have DNA databases, the difference with China is that in the West, they are gathered on the basis or suspicion of a crime having been committed.
I’ve been talking about this for some time now: China is increasingly turning into the totalitarian nightmare envisioned by George Orwell in 1984. Talking to business people at an event in China recently, few entertained much hope of a transition to a system more respectful of democratic principles or fundamental rights: on the one hand, the economy is doing very well, based on a very different approach, but one that is hugely efficient when it comes to taking strategic moves or adapting to the needs of the future.
At the same time, virtually all dissent has been silenced: the complaints that younger people had about recent restrictions on the use of VPNs were not about being prevented from political activity, but because they could no longer connect to certain services to find out what Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande or other entertainers were doing. Some business people I spoke to referred to the younger generations as “50 Cent”, the name used for members of the army of censors who monitor internet content and who praise the regime on forums that dare to question government policies.
The principles of the next leader of the world are noticeably different from what many of us consider fundamental to the societies we want to live in. And even worse: if you thinks that these developments don’t affect you because you don’t have plans to go to China, bear in mind that in many cases, we have seen evidences that our democratic governments wait and see what happens in China with these developments, to later on bring similar schemes of social control into our societies with the excuse of fighting terrorism, child porn or piracy. Good luck with that one …
(En español, aquí)
