China’s Kafkaesque Surveillance
China is rapidly building out a Total Surveillance State on a scale that far surpasses any government surveillance program in the West. The scope of this surveillance is so broad and pervasive that it borders on science fiction:
- Life Inside China’s Total Surveillance State (8 min video)
- China Aims For Near-Total Surveillance, Including in People’s Homes (“Sharp Eyes” nationwide surveillance network)
- “You’re Being Controlled All The Time” – An Inside Look At China’s “Social Credit Score”
- China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy
The implicit goal of China’s Total Surveillance State is to control the citizenry and root out any dissent before it threatens The Communist Party’s hold on power, but the explicit goal is a behavioral psychologist’s dream: to reward “positive social behaviors” and punish “negative social behaviors” via a “Social Credit Score.
There is something breathtakingly appealing to anyone in a position of power about this goal: imagine being able to catch miscreants who smoke in no-smoking zones, who jaywalk, who cheat people online, and of course, who say something negative about those in power.
But let’s ask a simple question of China’s vast surveillance system: what happens when it’s wrong? What if one of those thousands of cameras mis-identifies a citizen breaking some minor social code, and over time, does so enough times to trigger negative consequences for the innocent citizen? What recourse does the citizen have? It appears the answer is none, as the process is not strictly speaking judicial; the system appears to be largely automated.
Here’s a second question: is the scoring system truly transparent, or can insiders place their thumbs on the scale, so to speak, to exact revenge on personal enemies?
Question #3: Who has the power to change the weightings within the automated software? Will criticizing the government online generate 1 negative point this month but 10 points next month? How can citizens with a handful of negative points, some perhaps incorrect mis-identifications, avoid crossing the dreaded threshold if they don’t know how the system is truly ranking various violations?
This aligns perfectly with the world envisioned by Kafka in his novels The Trial and The Castle.
Kafka’s fictional accounts of power manifesting through an impenetrable bureaucracy describe a world with two primary features:
- The rules guiding the system are opaque to those enmeshed in the system
- There is no recourse for those unjustly persecuted or convicted by the system
What is it like to inhabit such a world? I’ve assembled some insightful comments on Kafka’s works from online resources.
Critic Michiko Kakutani: “(his novels share)…the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power; the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation.”
The Trial is “the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.”
“The law in Kafka’s works, rather than being representative of any particular legal or political entity, is usually interpreted to represent a collection of anonymous, incomprehensible forces. These are hidden from the individual but control the lives of the people, who are innocent victims of systems beyond their control.”
“For Kafka, law ‘has no meaning outside its fact of being a pure force of domination and determination.’”
Kafka’s novel The Castle explores “the motif of an oppressive and intangible system” and “the seemingly endless frustrations of man’s attempts to stand against the system.”
China is creating Kafka’s nightmare world as the perfection of centralized control of its citizenry. The question is: will the Chinese people tolerate this as long as the current artificial financialized “prosperity” reigns? What will happen to their perception and tolerance when the debt-fueled “prosperity” blows away like the sands of the Taklimakan Desert?
Gordon Long and I discuss the conceptual framework and implementation of Social Control in a two-part video series:
Citizens in one Chinese provincial capital can now be permanently blacklisted by China’s Orwellian digital panopticon ‘social credit system’ for simply failing to clean up after their pets. Here’s more via The Telegraph:
Chinese cities are launching a scoring system for dog owners where anyone found failing to care for their pets could be forced to pay a fine – or even have their dog confiscated.
The credit system is already being enforced in the Chinese city of Jinan, and requires anyone with a dog to register with the police – with only one dog permitted per person.
The license starts with a dozen points and is embedded as a QR code on a dog’s collar. Points are then deducted for various infractions, such as walking a dog without a leash or tag, not cleaning up poo, or being reported for a disturbance. Owners are docked three points if dogs are walked without a leash, for example, which must be less than 1.5 metres in length and under the control of someone at least 18 years of age.
The system is now invading people’s lives in all kinds of extreme ways from public transportation to dog-walking to flagging pedestrians for crossing the street in an unsafe manner . There are already a number of recent reports out of China of people either being punished and rewarded based on their social credit. For example earlier in the year student was denied his spot at university because his father was blacklisted for failing to pay off a 200,000-yuan ($28,700) bank loan. More commonly, people are now routinely barred from taking trains of public transport due to their low score.
But perhaps the most shocking aspect of the message recorded on the bullet train is just how seemingly banal it all sounds in the moment: one can easily imagine this kind of thing being rolled out in the West, which some analysts have been warning about.
The 30th anniversary on 4 June 2019 of the Chinese regime’s 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square served to highlight the extreme censorship in China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and President Xi Jinping.
The Tiananmen anniversary is referred to euphemistically in mainland China, as ‘the June Fourth Incident’. The regime there evidently fears that any talk, let alone public commemoration, of that historical event will stir up anti-regime unrest, which could endanger the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute power.
The internet in China is under control of the Chinese Communist Party, especially through the rigorous censorship practiced by the party’s top internet censor, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), established in 2014. In May 2017, according to a Reuters report, the CAC introduced strict guidelines requiring all internet platforms that produce or distribute news “to be managed by party-sanctioned editorial staff” who have been “approved by the national or local government internet and information offices, while their workers must get training and reporting credentials from the central government”.
Freedom House, in “Freedom on the Net 2018,” its 2018 assessment of freedom on the internet in 65 countries, placed China dead last. Reporters without Borders, in its 2019 worldwide index of press freedom, ranked China 177 out of 180 countries, surpassed only by Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at the time of its 2018 prison census, counted at least 47 journalists jailed in China, but according to the CPJ, the number could be much higher: “authorities are deliberately preventing information from getting out”. In March 2019, the CPJ was investigating at least a dozen additional cases, including the arrests in December 2018 of 45 contributors to the human rights and religious-liberty magazine, Bitter Winter, which China targets as a “foreign hostile website“.
On ‘sensitive’ occasions such as the Tiananmen anniversary, entire websites are blocked. Since April, ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary, Wikipedia had been blocked in all languages. Wikipedia’s Chinese-language site has been blocked by China since 2015. Websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other websites have also long been blocked in China.
Persecution / Organ Harvesting
During the 1990s in China, over 70 million people took up the practice of Falun Gong, which, at the time, was openly promoted by Chinese authorities. However, communist leaders came to fear that Falun Gong was ideological competition because of its independence, popularity, and traditional spiritual content. In July 1999, the Communist Party launched a campaign to eradicate Falun Gong through extensive propaganda, mass imprisonment, torture, and organ harvesting. The atrocities continue to this day.
China, the Enemy of the USA, Subversion Tactics, and Plans for Global Dominance
Gordon Chang, a China analyst and author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” pointed out how China is using several methods to war with the US using subversive attacks from within. Here are some excerpts from his interview with the Epoch Times:
- Radio Free Asia reported that the Chinese military—the People’s Liberation Army—actually based an intelligence unit in the, then, open Houston consulate. From there, they used artificial intelligence and big data to identify Americans likely to participate in Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests. And then they sent them videos through TikTok on how to riot.
- I believe the struggle is existential. We’ll start from a most fundamental point and that is, you know, people say that the United States and China are just involved in one of history’s many “boys will be boys” contest for dominance. I don’t see it that way at all. Because we’re not trying just to protect our position in the international system. We’re trying to protect that international system itself. The system that was first put in place in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia [that] recognizes the sovereignty of states. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has been talking for more than decades, dropping hints that he believes that the world should adopt Imperial era notions of Chinese rule, where Chinese Emperors believed that they had the mandate of heaven over what they called “Tianxia”, or, “All Under Heaven”.
- The attacks on the U.S. have been malicious. We see, for instance, their theft of U.S. intellectual property, somewhere between $125-150 billion— to maybe as much as $600 billion a year. They took steps in December and January to make sure that the coronavirus escaped China’s borders, infecting the world. This is an attack actually. This is the first attack in history where one nation has gone after all the others.
- You know, we’ve had a number of statements from senior Chinese military officers—admirals, generals—talking with glee and relish about killing tens of thousands of Americans. This is something we’ve got to be concerned [about], that you’ve got an officer class which is dedicated to going after the United States and killing us.
- China does not believe in law. We have dozens … hundreds of scholars around the world that study Chinese law. Well, that can be summarized in essentially one sentence: China has laws and regulations and often doesn’t follow them because the Communist Party determines eventual outcomes. That’s Chinese law. They do not expect other countries to follow their own laws. China, in one sense can do whatever it wants internally. But China needs to respect other countries, and it absolutely refuses to do so.
- On Xi Jinping’s Nov. 2020 G20 Summit proposal to facilitate both travel and commerce with a global QR code: So that means you can’t board a plane, for instance, without showing your QR code to a reader. And this is quite something because the QR code is going to have two things. It’s going to have health information, as well as travel information. And someone’s got to administer that system. And so China, being a participant in that, is going to have access one way or another, either legitimate access, or it’s going to hack all of this information.This is important, because we’ve got to view it in a broader context. And that is China has been trying to build the DNA database of people throughout the world. It already has the world’s largest DNA database, it wants to increase it, it’s been doing this in a number of different ways.So for instance, it has been hacking companies such as Anthem, the second largest American health insurer. That was discovered in 2015. So it’s been stealing DNA data. But it’s also been getting data by buying U.S. companies that have genetic profiles. So for instance, it bought GNC; it’s bought Complete Genomics. That is just a legal way of doing it. We shouldn’t be permitting [this], and we should be unwinding those acquisitions, by the way.Then there’s another way that China is getting DNA data. It’s offering low cost DNA testing to Ancestry and other companies. So if you go to … and I don’t want to name a name, but you know these companies, you see them advertised all the time. There’s a real chance that your DNA is, one way or another, being shipped off to China. Because last year, there were at least 23 accredited Chinese or Chinese-affiliated testers of DNA that were certified in the US. So they get it that way.China—at the same time that it’s collecting our DNA—is prohibiting the transfer of the DNA of Chinese people to foreigners. And the question is, what’s going on here? Bill Gertz of The Washington Times quoted an unnamed U.S. official saying that it looks like China is trying to develop biological weapons that are targeted at certain ethnic groups. Now, we don’t know if that is true. But we do know from the observable behaviors I’ve just been talking about, that that’s consistent with what we have been seeing. We’ve got to be concerned that is what’s occurring.
DNI John Ratcliffe spoke to Tucker Carlson in December 2020 to discuss the threat from China to the US and freedom in general:
Tucker also did a segment on how China censored a talk by a professor bragging how they had U.S. “people at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence. We have our friends.” He went on to say that these friends, many in Wall Street who were infuriated and tried to help ‘fix Trump’ following 2016 when President Trump came in with his America First policy, but couldn’t do much. Because of this, America’s most powerful elites – “the tradition elite, the political elite, the establishment” aligned to defeat Trump and help Biden because China helped Hunter and Biden Inc. to build those foundations. Watch below:
Tucker Carlson segment on a video deleted from Chinese social media of a professor saying that China "has people at the top of America's core inner circle of power & influence." pic.twitter.com/h3Ygy6UlHk
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) December 8, 2020
On 12/11/2020’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox News @ Night,” Rep.-elect Darrell Issa (R-CA) stated that China has a “three-tiered program” of spying that consists of “hundreds of thousands of people that act like spies that are coordinated by China.”
Issa said, “China has a three-tiered program. They have professional spies, they have their various companies that they send over that act like spies, and then they have a network of tens of thousands of students, who are, in fact, interrogated when they go home for the summer and whose families are still in China. You put that all together, it’s not just a few spies, it’s hundreds of thousands of people that act like spies that are coordinated by China. It’s aggressive. It isn’t just looking at government. It’s also looking at every part of our enterprise, every part of our business operations.”
References:
- Jean Chesneaux, Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries;
- Jean Chesneaux, Peasant Revolts in China, 1840-1949;
Sources:
- Mehmet Sabeheddin, New Dawn Magazine; | Image: Chinese Royal Dragon and the Star of the “Gods”
- The New American
- Activist Post
Additional Resources:
- The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party -first published November 2004 in Chinese by the New York-based Epoch Times. This series, which detail the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda, persecution, famine, massacre, tyranny, and censorship over half a century, have led more than 170 million Chinese to renounce the communist party and its affiliated organizations, fostering an unprecedented peaceful movement for transformation and change in China.The international communist movement has been spurned worldwide. The demise of the CCP is only a matter of time. Over the past decade, volunteers have translated the book into over 30 languages to allow more people in the world to understand and support the movement. We welcome you to find the book in your language under “Book List I” or “Book List II“
Chronology of China Related Events below:
Biden Center Hosted CCP Officials & COVID Cover-Up Chief Peter Daszak For Collaborators Event
Lawsuit Exposes COVID Jabs As Unsafe Transhumanist Gene Therapies
Top NATO Scientist With Security Clearance Busted Spying for China
UN Backed Great Reset Turns Off Texas Power: Millions left without Power and Food
Hunter Biden Writing Memoir Based On Drug Abuse – Gets A Cool $2 Million In Advance
Report: Hundreds of Twitter Accounts Linked to China Sowed Discord Before and After Election
Over $100K Of China-Made Counterfeit Currency Seized In Chicago
GOP Lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduces Articles of Impeachment on President Joe Biden
2021 Presidential Inauguration of Fraudulent President Joe Biden
