China’s ruling Communist Party is using artificial intelligence to turbocharge the surveillance and control of its 1.4 billion citizens, with the technology reaching further into daily life, predicting public demonstrations and monitoring the moods of prison inmates, according to a new report.
Many of these systems are already well-documented – from the country’s army of online censors maintaining its Great Firewall, to the surveillance cameras ubiquitous on almost every street and block across urban China.
But the report released Monday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) details how the government’s AI tools, used to “automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre‑emptively suppress dissent,” have grown more sophisticated in the past two years – against the backdrop of a deepening US-China tech rivalry.
“China is harnessing AI to make its existing systems of control far more efficient and intrusive. AI lets the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) monitor more people, more closely, with less effort,” said Nathan Attrill, a report co-author and senior China analyst at ASPI, which is partially funded by the Australian and other foreign governments.
“In practice, AI has become the backbone of a far more pervasive and predictive form of authoritarian control.”
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