Quote:China’s state-run Global Times boasted in an article on Thursday that Chinese people are increasingly becoming accustomed to the use of “emotion recognition technology,” artificial intelligence that allows the government to track human feelings, as part of everyday life.

The Global Times illustrated the usefulness of this technology with an example in which police arrest passengers of a car after using artificial intelligence to discover drugs in their car. “Emotion recognition technology” tells the officers that the passengers are more nervous than the average person at a checkpoint, which they use as an excuse to search the car.

The notoriously repressive Communist Party is allegedly applying “emotional recognition technology” in “various fields including health, anti-terrorism, and urban security,” according to the Global Times.

The development of this technology to criminalize feelings follows increasingly alarming developments in Chinese law enforcement, most recently the revelation that Chinese technology giant Huawei is developing facial recognition technology that can identify a person’s ethnicity, making it easier for Chinese police to persecute members of the Uyghur ethnic minority. Multiple governments around the world, including the current and past administration of the United States, have accused China of committing genocide against the Uyghur people.

The Communist Party has built over 1,000 concentration camps in the Uyghurs’ native region, Xinjiang, where survivors say they were forced into indoctrination, slavery, and subject to rape and torture. Of particular concern are reports that China is systematically sterilizing Uyghur women against their will to eliminate the ethnic group, a practice specifically listed in the definition of genocide.
The Communist Party claims that the concentration camps are “vocational training centers” for uneducated people and that all eyewitnesses are liars and paid actors.

Quote:The BBC on Tuesday reported on a “high-level Chinese study,” meant for top Chinese Communist Party officials only but accidentally leaked online, that outlined a plan to crush the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province by dispersing their population across China’s vast land mass, making it difficult for them to raise families and pass along their traditions.

The material reviewed by the BBC included a Chinese television report from 2017 that has “not featured in international news reporting until now.” The video included interviews with young Uyghurs that made it clear they were being intimidated into taking jobs far from home before they could start families with other Uyghurs.

“This video is remarkable. The Chinese government continually says that people are volunteering to engage in these programs, but this absolutely reveals that this is a system of coercion that people are not allowed to resist,” Professor Laura Murphy of Sheffield Hallam University told the BBC.

“The other thing it shows is this ulterior motive, that although the narrative is one of lifting people out of poverty, there’s a drive to entirely change people’s lives, to separate families, disperse the population, change their language, their culture, their family structures, which is more likely to increase poverty than to decrease it,” added Hallam, who once lived in Xinjiang.

The featured exhibit in the BBC article was a report prepared by Nankai University in Tianjin, China, in May 2018 that concluded mass labor transfers are “an important method to influence, meld, and assimilate Uyghur minorities,” reduce their “population density,” and produce a “transformation of their thinking.”

The authors found exported labor targets in some areas that amounted to shipping a fifth of their working-age populations to different provinces. Those mass labor transfers were accompanied by extensive political indoctrination, as each group of exported Uyghur workers was “led and accompanied by political cadres in order to implement security and management.”

The report, in other words, encouraged Chinese officials to force labor transfers upon the Uyghurs and other minorities for exactly the reason Hallam suspected: because if they were spread far and thin enough, they would soon cease to be Uyghurs.

Quote:Top Chinese political adviser Tan Jianfeng on Tuesday called for the establishment of a national “data bank” of biometric data, including facial and fingerprint recognition data, to protect Chinese “national security” and “information security.”

China’s state-run Global Times quoted Tan suggesting biometric data must be aggressively harvested and zealously protected because it will become increasingly necessary for life in the pervasively-monitored Communist state, and the data is extremely difficult to replace if lost, corrupted, or stolen:

Data security has become an important issue concerning national security, said Tan Jianfeng, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, noting that some key data, such as personal biometric data (face, fingerprint, and DNA data) have unique and non-renewable characteristics that can’t be recovered and changed once they are stolen and bring huge and irreversible risks.

Tan, also the head of the Shanghai Information Security Trade Association, proposed to accelerate the establishment of relevant laws and regulations, and strictly standardize and implement the collection, storage and use of key data.

He also suggested to establish data classification and management and a negative list should be made to prohibit the use of data in key areas such as biology and medicine on the internet.

UK-based technology firm Comparitech released a study in January that found China was “the world’s worst offender for its invasive use of biometric data.”

Quote:China’s effort to promote its coronavirus vaccines is not quite an “all hands on deck” effort, because one set of hands is notably missing: dictator Xi Jinping, who has evidently not been vaccinated himself and is putting very little personal effort into convincing his skeptical subjects to trust Chinese vaccine products.

India’s News18 noted in late January that Xi was conspicuously absent from the roster of China-friendly world leaders who have been publicly inoculated with the two Chinese coronavirus vaccines produced in China.

Asked if Xi, Premier Li Keqiang, or other top Chinese officials have been vaccinated, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying evasively replied, “I have no answer at this moment. Vaccine is our silver bullet for epidemic prevention and for our ultimate victory against the virus.”

In contrast, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi rushed to have himself inoculated on camera last week after India’s Bharat Biotech began manufacturing Covaxin, India’s domestically developed coronavirus vaccine. Modi apparently found it necessary to show his personal support to shore up public confidence amid complaints that Covaxin was rushed to the market without adequate testing.