The Chinese Surveillance State Proves That The Idea Of Privacy Is More “Malleable” Than You’d Expect

By: Zeyi Yang (MIT Technology Review)

It’s no surprise that last week, when the Biden administration updated its list of Chinese military companies blocked from accessing US technologies, it added Dahua. The second-largest surveillance camera company in the world, just after Hikvision, Dahua sells to over 180 countries. It exemplifies how Chinese companies have leapfrogged to the front of the video surveillance industry and have driven the world, especially China, to adopt more surveillance tech.

Over the past decade, the US—and the world more generally—have watched with a growing sense of alarm as China has emerged as a global leader in this space. Indeed, the Chinese government has been at the forefront of exploring ways to apply cutting-edge research in computer vision, the Internet of Things, and hardware manufacturing in day-to-day governance.

This has led to a slew of human rights abuses—notably, and perhaps most brutally, in monitoring Muslim ethnic minorities in the Western region of Xinjiang. At the same time, the state has also used surveillance tech for good: to find abducted children, for example, and to improve traffic control and trash management in populous cities…

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