US Tech Built China’s Surveillance State

The body camera, a cold, unblinking eye, dangled from the top of Yang Guoliang’s IV drip, meticulously cataloging every tremor of his broken body.

He lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed, the aftermath of a police beating with bricks.

For the Yang family, farmers in rural China, this was not an isolated incident but merely another data point in the vast, intricate network that had ensnared them, a digital cage built with alarming precision, largely on the back of American technology.

Their lives are an open book to the state: train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages, phone calls—all forwarded to the government.

Their modest home is ringed by over a dozen cameras.

Twenty times in recent years, they have attempted to journey to Beijing, only to be intercepted by masked men, often before they even depart.

Last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained, now facing trial for the nebulous crime of “disrupting the work of the Chinese state,” a charge that carries a decade in prison.

Their transgression? Merely seeking justice against local officials who seized their 1.5 acres of ancestral land in Jiangsu province.

“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang recounted, his voice hushed behind black curtains meant to block the relentless glare of police lights trained on his house.

“Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”

The Yangs are but two faces in a crowd of tens of thousands of “troublemakers” trapped in this digital panopticon, barred from leaving their provinces, sometimes even their homes.

What an Associated Press investigation has now laid bare is a deeply unsettling truth: this colossal surveillance apparatus, the largest in the world, was to a significant degree designed and built by companies hailing from a nation that has long prided itself on championing global freedoms – the United States.

Over the past quarter-century, American technology giants – including household names like IBM, Dell, and Cisco – sold billions of dollars in technology to Chinese police, government bodies, and surveillance firms.

This continued despite repeated, explicit warnings from the U.S. Congress and the media that these very tools were being weaponized to crush dissent, persecute religious sects, and target ethnic minorities.

Most critically, it was American surveillance technologies that provided the foundational infrastructure for the brutal mass detention campaign in the far western region of Xinjiang, where virtually the entire native Uyghur population was tracked, graded, and subjected to forced assimilation.

The mechanism was chillingly simple yet devastatingly effective: “predictive policing.”

This technology, imported from the U.S., devours and analyzes a staggering array of data – texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, internet activity, even water and power usage.

Its stated purpose: to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen.

Its actual application in China: unearthing individuals deemed “suspicious” and predicting their behavior, allowing police to preemptively detain people for crimes they haven’t committed and to threaten their friends and family into compliance.

Consider the “Golden Shield,” Beijing’s primary policing system, designed to censor the internet and crack down on “alleged terrorists,” the Falun Gong religious sect, and even “troublesome villagers.”

Thousands of pages of classified government blueprints, spirited out of China by a whistleblower and verified by the AP, reveal that a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with none other than IBM to design this system.

While IBM, along with other implicated companies, insists on full compliance with U.S. and Chinese laws and export controls, the moral quandary remains profound.

The system is unnervingly granular.

In Xinjiang, individuals were assigned risk scores, often out of 100, with deductions for actions as innocuous as growing a beard, being between 15 and 55 years old, or simply being Uyghur.

Some U.S. tech firms even tailored their marketing to this ethnic profiling.

Dell and a Chinese surveillance firm once promoted a “military-grade” AI-powered laptop with “all-race recognition” on Dell’s official WeChat account.

Biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific, until contacted by the AP, marketed DNA kits to Chinese police “designed” for the Chinese population, including “ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans.”

While the flow of American technology substantially slowed after 2019 due to outrage and sanctions over Xinjiang atrocities, the groundwork had already been laid.

Chinese companies have since built upon, and in some cases replaced, this U.S.-enabled foundation.

Yet, the ghost of past sales lingers.

NVIDIA and Intel chips remain indispensable for Chinese policing systems.

Maintenance contracts for existing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft software and hardware are ubiquitous, often managed through third parties.

What began in China more than a decade ago serves as a stark, chilling cautionary tale for a world grappling with the sharp rise of surveillance technology.

As U.S. tech companies, emboldened by political shifts, grow ever more powerful, the reach and sophistication of these technologies are expanding globally.

AI systems now track migrants in the U.S. and identify targets in the Israel-Hamas war.

Meanwhile, China, having learned from its American tutors, has transformed into a surveillance superpower, now exporting these very technologies to countries like Iran and Russia.

The AP investigation, meticulously pieced together from tens of thousands of leaked emails, confidential corporate documents, public marketing materials, and extensive interviews, paints a damning picture.

Companies often claim they are not responsible for how their products are used, yet marketing materials from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate explicitly pitched their technology as tools for Chinese police to control citizens.

Their sales pitches echoed Communist Party catchphrases like “stability maintenance” and “crushing protest,” even naming specific programs designed to stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes,” and the “Golden Shield.”

“Everything was built on American tech,” observed Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations, underscoring the initial technological vacuum in China.

“China’s capability was close to zero.”

While German, Japanese, and Korean firms played a role, American tech firms were, by far, the most significant enablers.

The Xinjiang government, in a statement, maintains that its surveillance is for “preventing and combating terrorist and criminal activity,” respecting privacy and legal rights, and not targeting any ethnicity.

They even pointed a finger back at the U.S., calling it “a true surveillance state.”

But for the Yangs, whose lives remain controlled by police databases powered by this technology, such assurances ring hollow.

Their house stands alone now, the last remnant of their village.

Yang Guoliang lives in isolation, his relatives having cut contact, unnerved by the constant police presence.

Thousands of documents, stuffed in drawers and boxes, chronicle their 16-year quest for justice.

In April, Yang received criminal charges detailing the cost of stopping his family’s “abnormal petitioning”—approximately $37,000.

“Because of this technology… we have no freedom at all,” lamented Yang Caiying, the elder daughter, 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.”

Her words serve as a chilling prophecy, a warning from the heart of an automated autocracy built, ironically, with the tools of freedom.