Sunday, 10 September 2006

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft endured a wave of public disapproval earlier this year over their compliance with Chinese censorship of their websites. But another striking form of tech commerce is taking place below the radar of the public: major US manufacturers are rushing to supply China's police with the latest information technology.

Oracle has sold software to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which oversees both criminal and ideological investigations. The ministry uses the software to manage digital identity cards, which are replacing the paper ID that citizens must carry.

Meanwhile, regional police departments are modernising their computer networks with routers and switches purchased from Cisco. And Motorola has sold the authorities handheld devices that will allow street cops to tap databases sold, in turn, by another US company, EMC, to the Ministry of Public Security.

"It's a booming market," says Simon Zhou, EMC's top executive in Beijing. "We can expect big revenue from public security."

The scramble to sell technology to Chinese law enforcers seems at odds with the intent of an American export law enacted after the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The sanctions prohibited the export "of any crime-control or detection instruments or equipment".
"We wanted to undermine the effectiveness of the police in rounding up, imprisoning and torturing political dissidents, not only those involved in the Tiananmen Square movement, but for years to come," explains Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos, who helped draft the law.

But that message has been muffled. The Commerce Department, which enforces the sanctions, has applied them primarily to items such as handcuffs, helmets and shotguns. Little of the modern IT now sold to the Chinese police is on the banned list. Reliable revenue figures for sales aren't available, but industry analysts estimate they total tens of millions of dollars a year, and counting.

American manufacturers say they have no obligation or ability to determine whether Chinese security forces use the technology for political repression. On the contrary, capitalism improves the lot of ordinary Chinese, some executives contend. 'Anything that helps the country to modernise will help it to improve its human rights situation," says John Chen, chief executive of Sybase, which sells database programs to the Shanghai police. "The more accurate information the police have on an individual target, the more sensible they can be."

But the same technology that helps track down drug dealers or murderers can also be deployed to trace and arrest dissidents, says Eric Harwit, a China scholar at the University of Hawaii "It's a double-edged sword."

Despite the improvement in its image on the world stage, China still has a dismal human rights record. The US State Department says that the government is holding at least 260,000 people in ideological "re-education" camps. Among those detained are pro- democracy activists and members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement [...].

US technology has been used at least indirectly to improve the government's ability to identify Falun Gong adherents, according to Hao Fengjun, a former security official who fled China for Australia.
Some US companies have gone out of their way to address the Chinese government's pronounced concern about avoiding unrest. In Chinese-language brochures distributed at a police-technology trade show in Shanghai in 2002, Cisco repeatedly referred to its gear using phrases such as "strengthening police control" and "increasing social stability". The company says there's nothing unusual about its marketing. "We sell to police organisations in many countries," says Rick Justice, vice-president for worldwide operations. "We do business [in China] the way we do business anywhere."

Cisco and other companies emphasise that they obtain licences from the Commerce Department for tech sales to China "We follow very closely and ethically all the laws the government has in place," says Mr Justice. But Richard Bush, a former congressional aide who worked on the Tiananmen sanctions, expresses surprise when told of the types of agreement that companies are signing. "[Are the contracts] antithetical to what core members of the legislative effort wanted? Yes."

Some analysts attribute the lenient approach of the Commerce Department to its enthusiasm in recent years for expanding exports to China Matthew Borman, assistant commerce secretary for export, counters that the agency merely follows the law: "Items controlled under this authority are those exclusively or primarily used for crime control and detection."

But Mr Lantos says the sanctions have been undermined. "The department's decision to interpret the law narrowly is unconscionable. By allowing American companies to sell hi-tech computer and communications devices to the Chinese police, our nation is directly aiding in the suppression of political dissent in China."

Thomas Lam, president of Cisco's Chinese operations, says: "The networking hardware and software products that Cisco sells in China are exactly the same as we sell in every market in the world. It is our users, not Cisco, who determine the applications they deploy." US companies also argue that if they didn't sell to the Chinese authorities, competitors from other countries would.

Although some US tech companies have done business with China's police since the 1990s, the true coming-out party occurred in December 2002 - at a conference in Shanghai billed as the China Information Infrastructure Expo and sponsored in part by the Ministry of Public Security. Companies from around the globe set up booths, and the Chinese hosts shopped for digital tools for projects with names such as Golden Customs and Golden Tax.

The campaign to upgrade police technology, which continues today, is called Golden Shield. At the conference, Cisco's booth was surrounded by video screens showing California police officers using mobile handsets linked to databases of surveillance footage, says author Ethan Gutmann, who attended the event and wrote the 2004 book Losing the New China. Hopes that Western technology would spark political reform in China have been unfulfilled, he argues.

Defending the company's marketing, Cisco spokesman Terry Alberstein says: "The brochures in question were aimed specifically toward local police, outlining how Cisco products can improve access to resources by networking computing... for example, making additional information available to police in patrol cars."

It's difficult to pin down examples of Chinese police using US technology to squash dissent. Company executives stress that they don't tend to work directly with security officials to customise hardware or software' the government employs Chinese-owned "systems integrators" to do this fine-tuning.
"We are just providing a database product," says Derek Williams, chairman of Oracle, Asia Pacific and Japan. "A database is like a filing cabinet. Somebody has to provide solutions on top of that, and that's done by a Chinese company."

US software can be traced to modernisation efforts supporting at least one arm of Chinese ideological enforcement: the State Council Leadership Team for Preventing & Handling Cults, which tracks followers of unauthorised religions such as Falun Gong. Hao Fengjun worked there until he fled China last year and he has added his voice to Falun Gong's protests at state oppression. He says the Tianjin branch has a database containing 30,000 members of the banned [group], as well as names from otherunauthorised religious groups. Some of the data was drawn from China's elaborate hukou, the household registration system that helps the state monitor the population.

The digitisation of hukou - an enormous task that is part of the Golden Shield project - has involved US technology. "Aside from the public security bureau's use of technology for criminal cases, the most important [use] is the tracking and suppression of Falun Gong followers," says Mr Hao. The American companies emphasise that they don't determine how the Chinese use their products.

While there has been relatively little objection to tech sales overall, Cisco has been subject to more scrutiny than other manufacturers, probably because it has long been active in China. Last year it faced a shareholder resolution demanding it be more open about its dealings with the Chinese. The resolution was defeated.

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