(2025-09-09) Silicon Valley Enabled Brutal Mass Detention And Surveillance In China Internal Documents Show

Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show. 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

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.

The AP obtained tens of thousands of pages of classified and internal documents that show how U.S. companies designed and marketed systems that became the foundation for China’s digital cage

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. (2008-05-31-KleinChinasAllseeingEye)

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.”

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.”

President Donald Trump has rolled back a Joe Biden-era executive order meant to safeguard civil rights from new AI/surveillance technologies

a cautionary tale for other countries at a time when the use of surveillance technology worldwide is rising sharply, including in the United States

Nvidia and Intel partnered with China’s three biggest surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to cameras used for video surveillance across China, including Xinjiang and Tibet, until sanctions were imposed.

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.

Huadi worked with IBM to construct China’s national fingerprint database

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

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,”

“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.”

the Yangs sued local police. In June 2015, a judge ruled their land had been seized illegally. The Yangs celebrated.

*But just weeks after the ruling, officers identified human rights lawyers through the “Golden Shield” technology, cuffed hundreds of them and pressed them into police vans across China. One lawyer later recalled how police monitored his messages on human rights in WeChat before they grabbed him, shackled him to a chair, and tortured him.

Overnight, China’s budding rights-defense movement was dealt a fatal blow — and with it, the Yangs’ case*

When bombs tore through a train station in Xinjiang’s capital hours after a visit by leader Xi Jinping in 2014, Xi demanded a crackdown. “He was super angry,” said Abliz, one of the engineers with the Xinjiang government. “They concluded they weren’t surveilling Uyghurs closely enough

*The next year, in April 2015, Abliz attended a closed-door exposition in Xinjiang. A booth ran by Landasoft, the former IBM partner, caught his eye.

After years as a vendor of IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to Xinjiang police, Landasoft had struck out on its own, touting i2-like software it said could detain extremists before they caused trouble. The similarity was no coincidence: Landasoft’s software was copied from i2, according to leaked emails and records.*

Hundreds of thousands of people were tagged “untrustworthy”, leaked messages show. Leaked documents show the IJOP flagged 24,412 people as “suspicious” in just one week in 2017, leading to most being detained.

The technology was crude and flawed. Landasoft emails show engineers frantically fixing a software bug to release hundreds of people categorized as high-risk.

Yet officers were told “computers cannot lie” and that the IJOP’s listed targets were “absolutely correct,” Abliz said. The software’s orders were often obeyed fearfully, unquestioningly.
“The tech companies told the government their software is perfect,” Abliz said. “It’s all a myth.”

In May 2017, Kalbinur Sidik, a teacher now in the Netherlands, was summoned to her district government office in a yellow brick apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital. A young Uyghur woman, fresh from college, rose and introduced herself as a local official. Sidik, the woman explained, was being appointed as the head of her building, responsible for collecting information on neighbors.

Xinjiang officials issued arrest quotas

At the district office, she observed the logos popping up on screens: Oracle, Microsoft, Intel.

As police swept Xinjiang, Landasoft purchased software from Pivotal, a cloud company later acquired by Broadcom, emails show. And Landasoft registered accounts on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in 2018, seeking to expand cloud offerings to police clients, emails show.

*“The Xinjiang model is being copied everywhere, in every city in China,” Liu said.

In 2024, Liu left China, ignoring an airport officer who warned that wherever he went, he would be watched.*

In this security camera video, police officers hold up Yang Li as she is returned to her family home after she was knocked unconscious by masked police after petitioning in Beijing, Friday, March, 8, 2024, in Changzhou in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province.