The Chinese Communist Party wants to know
What you think about China
So they’re tracking you online
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
Have you ever tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protests?
Or called for a boycott of the Chinese Communist Party’s Genocide Olympics on Facebook?
Maybe you shared a meme comparing Chinese leader Xi Jinping to a silly old bear.
In fact, if you’ve said anything about China on the internet,
the Chinese Communist Party could be tracking you online.
That’s according to two recent investigations. One from the Washington Post
on how China harvests masses of data on Western targets.
And one from the New York Times on how Chinese police track critics on Twitter and Facebook.
And the reports are pretty disturbing.
“China is…mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter,
to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets.”
Wow. Speaking as a foreign target,
I hope the Chinese regime doesn’t find out about my embarrassing secret
Beanie Babies collection.
So how did the Washington Post and the New York Times find out China was tracking foreign
targets online? Primarily by reading through hundreds of bidding documents and contracts
for Chinese government projects that were publicly accessible.
I’m going to guess they’re not publicly accessible anymore.
This reminds me of the time people found
“interrogation” chairs were being sold on Taobao, China’s version of Ebay.
But don’t worry, Chinese officials promised their interrogation chairs were “padded for comfort.”
And they totally don’t torture or hold political prisoners.
And if you criticize the Chinese Communist Party online, and then go to China, you could
experience this comfort padding for yourself. So how does the Party track critics online?
We know they’ve been doing it in China for years. Chinese authorities have developed
a sophisticated online surveillance network using what they call “public opinion analysis software.”
It’s easier in China since they force everyone to register for the Internet using their real names.
But now they’ve shifted their focus overseas, too.
And “public opinion analysis” isn’t just for figuring out what people think.
“The services also provide increasingly technical surveillance
for China’s censorship apparatus. And most systems include alarm functions designed
to alert officials and police to negative content in real time.”
This is part of what the Chinese Communist Party calls “public opinion guidance work.” Basically,
using censorship and propaganda to change what people say about China.
Calling censorship and propaganda “public opinion guidance”
is like claiming that those torture chairs are “padded for comfort.”
Or that Uyghurs aren’t in concentration camps, they’re in “vocational training centers.”
Sometimes I wish I could talk like the Communist Party.
“No sir, I did not crash into your car. I was giving you a vehicular fistbump.”
And just like vehicular fistbumps, public opinion guidance isn’t cheap. It’s clear
from even a few examples that the Communist Party has spent millions on this online surveillance.
That includes paying more than $300,000 dollars for a software program that mines
Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics.
Another $200,000 dollars for a program that analyzes Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan.
And operating an entire cybercenter
in Xinjiang that’s used to monitor Uyghur language content abroad.
The Party also spends money buying and maintaining foreign social media accounts
for Chinese police and propaganda departments.
Wait, is that why I keep getting friend requests from Not the Ministry of Public Security?
But that’s not all. The Washington Post spoke to people who are involved in “public opinion
analysis” in Beijing. And they described software systems that “automatically collect
and store Facebook and Twitter data in real time on domestic Chinese servers.”
Both Facebook and Twitter ban organizations from doing this without authorization.
So the question is, do Facebook and Twitter not know what the Chinese regime is doing?
Or have they authorized it?
Both options are kind of terrifying.
And remember when I told you earlier these software systems include alarms
for negative content? That’s not all. They also report negative content
directly to a 24-hour hotline run by the Communist Party’s censorship apparatus.
And those reports include the details of individual social media users.
What does the Chinese Communist Party do with those personal details?
I’ll tell you after the break.
Welcome back. Remember last year, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping
called on officials to present a more “lovable” image of China?
And some “experts” were like, hey this means China is going to tone things down and be reasonable.
Yeah, no. They totally misread what Xi was saying. Because in the same speech,
Xi Jinping also called for officials to develop “international public opinion guidance.”
Remember, public opinion guidance means using censorship and propaganda to control what people
say. So Xi was saying Chinese officials should present a “lovable” image of China
by shutting up anyone who presents an unlovable image of China.
That includes people who criticize the Chinese Communist Party on Western social media.
And the Party isn’t just targeting prominent, outspoken activists.
Back in 2020, a Chinese student who was going to the University of Minnesota
was jailed for 6 months in China over tweets he posted in the US.
The New York Times spoke to another Chinese student who had set up what she thought
was an anonymous Twitter account.
But when she went back to her hometown in China last year,
police tracked her down. They knocked on her parents’ door,
took her to the police station, and told her to delete her Twitter account.
Even after she moved abroad, the police called her and her mother
to see if she had visited any human rights websites.
Getting in trouble with the police for visiting human rights websites
is like getting in trouble with your dentist for flossing every night. It’s what you’re
supposed to do as a decent human being—although most of us don’t do it as often as we should.
And this student wasn’t the only Chinese person living abroad who was targeted by police.
Because even if Chinese police can’t threaten you, they can always go after your family.
“When a Chinese student living in Taiwan criticized China [last year],
both of his parents disappeared for 10 days.”
Meanwhile a Chinese student studying in Canada
was harassed by the Chinese police over an anonymous Twitter account with two followers.
He had only tweeted three times. But Chinese police
questioned his father, and then directly called him on WeChat.
The police told him they had tracked him by his IP address and knew where he lived in Canada.
When the student went to the Canadian police for help, they told him they couldn’t do
anything about it because it was happening in China. They didn’t even open a police report.
The student deleted his tweets. All three of them.
Now all of these cases involve Chinese police harassing ethnic Chinese people.
And it makes sense that they would target them.
The Chinese Communist Party wants to silence dissent among Chinese people
so they can lie about how all Chinese people love the Party.
Plus it’s just easier to threaten Chinese people who have family back in China.
They do the same thing to Uyghurs and Tibetans, too. Basically if you have loved ones in China,
the Chinese regime will treat them like hostages.
But while the Party is starting with people who are easier to threaten,
their expanding surveillance network shows the Party is coming for foreigners, too.
Uh, Shelley? Why did you put a photo of me up there?
Does this mean they’re going to find out about the Beanie Babies?!
What can I say, I’m a 90s kid.
The point is, no one is safe from Chinese surveillance.
The New York Times spoke to a contractor who does surveillance work for the Chinese authorities.
The Times called him a specialist in tracking people living in the US.
According to the specialist, a single tweet or Facebook post
could be enough to attract official attention.
He said he had been assigned to investigate Chinese undergraduates studying in the US,
a Chinese-American policy analyst who is a US citizen, and journalists who had worked in China.
He showed the Times a sample document that included “personal and career information
and professional and family connections to China,
as well as a statistical analysis of the reach of the person’s account.”
So how does this guy get such detailed information?
“He said he used voter registries, driver’s license records
and hacked databases on the dark web to pinpoint the people behind the posts.
Personal photos posted online can be used to infer addresses and friends.”
Hold on, he uses voter registries and personal photos?
Kind of ironic that the greatest danger to US democracy could come
from people posting “I voted” selfies on Facebook.
But it’s not just dangerous because of who’s being tracked by the Chinese regime.
It’s also dangerous because of who’s doing the tracking.
I’ll explain more after the break.
Welcome back.
It’s not surprising that Chinese police are
buying these surveillance systems to track people on Facebook and Twitter.
But what is unexpected is who’s running these systems.
In many cases, it’s being done by Chinese state-run media, like the People’s Daily.
“The People’s Daily Online . . . which provides one of the country’s largest contract public
opinion analysis services, won dozens of projects that include overseas social media data collection
services for police, judicial authorities, Communist Party organizations and other clients.”
Some of the documents mention the People’s Daily having overseas servers as a big plus.
That means they can monitor people overseas
without having to deal with China’s Great Firewall.
But it’s not just the People’s Daily. My favorite state-run media, the Global Times,
won a half a million dollar contract to provide a “China-related foreign
media and journalist opinion monitoring system” for China’s Foreign Ministry.
“Close to 40 percent of the Global Times monitoring unit’s staffers
are senior Global Times reporters.”
In other words, The Global Times is using reporters as spies.
In 2020, the Trump administration designated most
major Chinese state-run media in the US as foreign missions.
That means the US government recognizes these outlets
as arms of the Chinese state, just like the Chinese embassy.
They also put a cap on how many employees these state-run media could have in the US.
At the time, the Trump administration was criticized for stifling press freedom.
But as these reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times show, Chinese state-run
media workers aren’t journalists. They’re propaganda workers for a hostile state.
Some of them don’t just push propaganda. They also spy on people for the Chinese regime.
And they’re gathering information that’s used by Chinese police
to threaten people who criticize China.
You know, for years we were told that China might be strict to its own people inside China,
but don’t worry. The Chinese authorities don’t care what happens outside China. They just want
to be left alone! If we don’t interfere with them, they won’t interfere with us.
That was a stupid lie.
And now we’re facing the consequences.
I’m not saying people should stop criticizing the Chinese Communist Party. That’s what they want.
In fact, this just means we need to further expose the Party.
Just make sure you’re doing your best to
protect your Beanie Babies.
And now it’s time for me to answer a question from a fan who supports the
show on the crowdfunding website Patreon or the community subscription platform Locals.
Well Dahoover, Xi Jinping would never visit Taiwan, with one exception.
You see, the Chinese Communist Party can’t admit that Taiwan is a separate country
that Xi would need permission to go to. They don’t acknowledge Taiwan’s government at all.
So Xi would never do an official state visit to Taiwan because that would be
admitting that Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen is equal in rank to Xi.
Now in 2015, Xi Jinping did meet with then president of Taiwan Ma Ying-jeou.
But they met in Singapore.
Things were very different back then. Ma was trying to open up relations with mainland China,
especially economic relations. He requested the meeting with Xi.
And the Communist Party thought they would just be able to subvert Taiwan into becoming
part of China, using the One Country, Two Systems policy they used in Hong Kong.
But that didn’t happen. And after the Hong Kong protests,
Taiwanese people won’t accept One Country, Two Systems.
At this point, the only way Xi will visit Taiwan is after a successful invasion by
the People’s Liberation Army. So let’s hope he never gets there.
Thanks for your question, Dahoover. And thank you for your support on Locals.
And if you’d like me to answer your question on the show while supporting the work we do,
head over to patreon.com/Chinauncensored.
Or locals.com/chinauncensored.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.