China’s Export of Surveillance Tools to Many Countries Draws Ire

CCP’s surveillance

[People News] Recent evidence shows that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is exporting technologies used to control its own population to other countries, including internet surveillance systems and robot police dogs equipped with facial recognition. This move is seen as an attempt to intervene in other countries’ public security systems in order to expand its international security influence. However, civil groups in Kazakhstan have strongly criticized the CCP’s actions.

According to a report by the Chosun Ilbo, well-known Kazakh political blogger Sanjar Bokayev was recently arrested by police at Almaty Airport. The reason was that an AI-based facial recognition system called “Target-eye” identified him as a “civil activist,” triggering an alert.

After the news broke, civil groups in Kazakhstan strongly criticized their government for implementing an excessive surveillance system and also issued harsh criticism toward the CCP. This is because most of the surveillance cameras, internet control systems, and other “citizen monitoring technologies” in Kazakhstan are imported from China. Kazakh digital rights activist Dana Malikova stated: “After the 2022 domestic riots, thousands of Chinese-made surveillance cameras covered the Almaty urban area.”

The report states that in recent years, the CCP has been actively exporting Chinese-made surveillance technology overseas, providing authoritarian regimes with “tools” to strengthen their control over citizens, and even “packaging” police training programs along with the technology. The CCP’s export of surveillance technologies is based on Xi Jinping’s GSI (Global Security Initiative), intended to expand the CCP’s international security influence. It is also meant to counter the U.S. ILEA (International Law Enforcement Academy) system, which since 1995 has helped over 100 countries respond to crime.

Recently, based on tens of thousands of leaked internal documents from Geedge Networks (China Jijizhi (Hainan) Information Technology Co., Ltd.), global digital security research organization InterSecLab discovered that the CCP has provided surveillance solutions—including internet censorship, VPN blocking, and device tracking—to the governments of at least four countries: Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia.

Data from 2024 shows that Myanmar’s military junta has deployed Geedge systems in 26 data centers belonging to 13 telecom companies. This enables the junta to monitor the online activities of tens of millions of people without restriction. Pakistan has also replaced its original firewall with Geedge’s system.

Statistics from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the United States show that in the area of “police training,” the CCP has provided nearly 900 training sessions to 138 countries since 2000. The number of sessions increased from 14 per year in 2010 to 138 in 2019, about a tenfold increase. According to analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), 82% of authoritarian regimes worldwide have received police training from China. Most training takes place at Chinese police universities, where overseas delegations of dozens of people undergo months-long programs. Trainees learn China-style law enforcement systems, visit local public security bureaus, and study subjects such as border control and railway security. Some courses directly involve regime-security scenarios such as VIP protection and riot suppression.

Some observers have noted that China holds 40% of the global surveillance camera market and more than 70% of the global drone market. Forecasts suggest that in the future, China will use drone units, robot dogs, and humanoid robots as the three new pillars of surveillance technology.

According to The Economist, the CCP has also exported the “Fengqiao Model”—a mass-surveillance and mutual-monitoring system popularized during the Mao era—to the Solomon Islands. The article concludes: exporting violent governance models to other countries is simply asking for trouble. △