China’s surveillance state, the world’s largest, has its roots in technology provided by U.S. firms.
The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks.
By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.
Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state — a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison.
Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.
“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said, sitting behind black curtains that block him from the glare of police lights trained straight at his house. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”
Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.
Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.
U.S. companies did this by bringing “predictive policing” to China — technology that sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their behavior. But they also allow Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.
For example, the AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield” for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome, according to thousands of pages of classified government blueprints taken out of China by a whistleblower, verified by AP and revealed here for the first time. IBM and other companies that responded said they fully complied with all laws, sanctions and U.S. export controls governing business in China, past and present.
Across China, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.
Some tech companies even specifically addressed race in their marketing. Dell and a Chinese surveillance firm promoted a “military-grade” AI-powered laptop with “all-race recognition” on Dell’s official WeChat account in 2019. And until contacted by AP in August, biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific’s website marketed DNA kits to the Chinese police as “designed” for the Chinese population, including “ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans.”
While the flood of American technology slowed considerably starting in 2019 after outrage and sanctions over atrocities in Xinjiang, it laid the foundation for China’s surveillance apparatus that Chinese companies have since built on and in some cases replaced. To this day, concerns remain over where technology sold to China will end up.
For example, 20 former U.S. officials and national security experts wrote a letter in late July criticizing a deal for NVIDIA to sell H20 chips used in artificial intelligence to China, with 15% of revenues going to the U.S. government. They said no matter who the chip is sold to, it will fall into the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services.
NVIDIA said it does not make surveillance systems or software, does not work with police in China and has not designed the H20 for police surveillance. NVIDIA posted on its WeChat social media account in 2022 that Chinese surveillance firms Watrix and GEOAI used its chips to train AI patrol drones and systems to identify people by their walk, but told the AP those relationships no longer continue. The White House and Department of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.
Thermo Fisher and hard drive maker Seagate promoted their products to Chinese police at conferences and trade shows this year, according to online posts. Officers stroll the streets of Beijing with Motorola walkie talkies. NVIDIA and Intel chips remain critical for Chinese policing systems, procurements show. And contracts to maintain existing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft software and gear remain ubiquitous, often with third parties.
What started in China more than a decade ago could be seen as a cautionary tale for other countries at a time when the use of surveillance technology worldwide is rising sharply, including in the United States. Emboldened by the Trump administration, U.S. tech companies are more powerful than ever, and President Donald Trump has rolled back a Biden-era executive order meant to safeguard civil rights from new surveillance technologies.
As the capacity and sophistication of such technologies has grown, so has their reach. Surveillance technologies now include AI systems that help track and detain migrants in the U.S. and identify people to kill in the Israel-Hamas war. China, in the meantime, has used what it learned from the U.S. to turn itself into a surveillance superpower, selling technologies to countries like Iran and Russia.
The AP investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company; tens of thousands of pages of confidential corporate and government documents; public Chinese language marketing material; and thousands of procurements, many provided by ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the non-profit Asia Society. The AP also drew from dozens of open record requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former Chinese and American engineers, executives, experts, officials, administrators, and police officers.
Though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate show. Their sales pitches — made both publicly and privately — cited Communist Party catchphrases on crushing protest, including “stability maintenance,” “key persons,” and “abnormal gatherings,” and named programs that stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes” and the “Golden Shield.”
Other companies, like Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, creator of mapping software ArcGIS Esri, and what was then Hewlett Packard, or HP, also sold technology or services knowingly to Chinese police or surveillance companies. Four practicing lawyers said sales like those uncovered by AP could potentially go against at least the spirit, if not the letter, of U.S. export laws at the time, which the companies denied.
American technology made up nearly every part of China’s surveillance apparatus, AP found:
MILITARY AND POLICE: In 2009, Chinese defense contractor Huadi worked with IBM to build national intelligence systems, including a counterterrorism system, used by the Chinese military and China’s secret police, the Ministry of State Security. Chinese agents sold IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to the same ministry and to Chinese police, including in Xinjiang, through the 2010s, leaked emails and marketing posts show. IBM said it has no record of its i2 software ever having been sold to the Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang.
SURVEILLANCE: NVIDIA and Intel partnered with China’s three biggest surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to camera systems used for video surveillance across China, including Xinjiang and Tibet, until sanctions were imposed. NVIDIA said in a post dating to 2013 or later that a Chinese police institute used its chips for surveillance technology research.
ETHNIC REPRESSION: IBM, Oracle, HP, and ArcGIS developer Esri sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of geographic and mapping software to Chinese police that allows officers to detect when blacklisted Uyghurs, Tibetans or dissidents stray out of provinces or villages. As late as 2019, with detentions in Xinjiang well underway, Dell hosted an industry summit in its capital. Dell and then-subsidiary VMWare sold cloud software and storage devices to police and entities providing data to police in Tibet and Xinjiang, even in 2022 after abuses there became widely known.
IDENTIFICATION: Huadi worked with IBM to construct China’s national fingerprint database; IBM told AP it never sold “fingerprinting-specific product or technology” to the Chinese government “in violation of US law.” HP and VMWare sold technology used for fingerprint comparison by Chinese police, while Intel partnered with a Chinese fingerprinting company to make their devices more effective. IBM, Dell, and VMWare also promoted facial recognition to Chinese police. China’s police and police DNA labs bought Dell and Microsoft software and equipment to save genetic data on police databases.
CENSORSHIP AND CONTROL: In 2016, Dell boasted on its WeChat account that its services assisted the Chinese internet police in “cracking down on rumormongers.” Seagate said on WeChat in 2022 that it sells hard drives “tailor made” for AI video systems in China for use by police to help them “control key persons,” despite facing backlash for selling drives in Xinjiang.
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“Everything was built on American tech,” said Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations who studied the use of U.S. tech by Chinese police. “China’s capability was close to zero.”
IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies. Seagate and Western Digital said they adhere to all relevant laws and regulations where they operate.
Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and tech conglomerate Broadcom, which acquired VMWare and cloud company Pivotal in 2023, did not comment on the record; HP, Motorola and Huadi did not respond, and Esri denied involvement but did not reply to examples. Microsoft told AP it found no evidence that it “knowingly sold technology to the military or police” as part of the “Golden Shield” update.
Some U.S. companies ended contracts in China over rights concerns and after sanctions. For example, IBM said it has prohibited sales to Tibet and Xinjiang police since 2015, and suspended business relations with defense contractor Huadi in 2019.
However, sanctions experts noted that the laws have significant loopholes and often lag behind new developments. For example, a ban on military and policing gear to China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre does not take into account newer technologies or general-use products that can be applied in policing.
They also noted that the law around export controls is complicated. Raj Bhala, an expert in international trade law at the University of Kansas, said the issues the AP described fell into “the kind of gray area that we put in exams.”
“It would raise concerns about possible inconsistencies, possible violations,” said Bhala, who emphasized he was speaking generally and not about any specific company. “But I really stress ‘possible.’ We need to know more facts.”
While German, Japanese and Korean firms also played a role, American tech firms were by far the biggest suppliers.
The Xinjiang government said in a statement that it uses surveillance technologies to “prevent and combat terrorist and criminal activity,” that it respects citizens’ privacy and legal rights and that it does not target any particular ethnicity. The statement said Western countries also use such technology, calling the U.S. “a true surveillance state.” Other government agencies did not respond to a request for comment, including China’s police and authorities in the Yangs’ province.
This technology still powers the police database that controls the Yangs and other ordinary people. An estimate based on Chinese government statistics found at least 55,000 to 110,000 were put under residential surveillance in the past decade, and vast numbers are restricted from travel in Xinjiang and Tibet. China’s cities, roads and villages are now studded with more cameras than the rest of the world combined, analysts say — one for every two people.
“Because of this technology … we have no freedom at all,” said Yang Guoliang’s elder daughter, Yang Caiying, now in exile in Japan. “At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”
