‘Total Security State’: Shanghai Intensifies Surveillance of Foreign Journalists Who Go to Xinjiang

The Chinese Communist Party is ramping up its campaign against foreign journalists, with a special big-data-powered alert system that can single out reporters who travel to the Xinjiang region, according to a document discovered by researchers. It’s part of the Party’s overall drive to ensure that it has total control over every inch of China, one expert said.

Details about the plan — which comes amid an intensifying drive to close China off from the rest of the world — are laid out in a tender published online in February by the Public Security Bureau of Songjiang, one of Shanghai’s most populous districts. The U.S. surveillance research outfit IPVM recently discovered the Songjiang bureau’s tender, a 56 page document, and shared it with National Review. (IPVM has conducted its own analysis here).

“This project shows that PRC authorities are deeply afraid of independent reporting on Xinjiang, despite their claims that the region is open to the world. It also confirms that PRC police remain obsessed with targeting and tracking an entire ethnic group, the Uyghurs, in a clearly racist practice which needs to end,” IPVM’s Charles Rollet said.

The project, which was eventually awarded to a local government contractor, calls for the construction of a massive big-data system that sifts through information compiled from a Shanghai-police administered cloud platform powered by Alibaba. That system would then track specific categories of people. In addition to foreign journalists and Uyghurs, other groups singled out include drug traffickers, prostitutes, and foreigners with expired work permits.

To create profiles on individual journalists who have traveled to Xinjiang, the system would compile numerous different sources of information, including plane and train tickets. The document states that the system will “filter flight or train records that have been to Xinjiang and cross-check that with the basic information of the overseas personnel database to extract the information of personnel that has been to Xinjiang, and relate that to the information of foreign journalists living in China as well as the information of real personnel that have changed their ID in Shanghai to generate information on overseas personnel special groups.”

The Chinese Communist Party has turned Xinjiang into an open-air prison as part of a genocidal campaign to eradicate Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities, and foreign journalists have already faced intense scrutiny for their travels there.

In one 2021 case, a CNN team that ventured out to Xinjiang to locate the children of Uyghur émigrés abroad was followed at every turn by plainclothes security officers and blocked from going down roads that could potentially take them to detention centers.

Considering those existing controls on foreigners’ access to Xinjiang, the Songjiang alert system is “absolutely not a surprising development,” said Geoffrey Cain, a journalist who has reported from Xinjiang. He was expelled from the region after security officials detained him and forced him to delete content from his phone in 2017.

Nevertheless, this data, Cain said, “is almost certainly going up the ladder to the level of the national Party officials. That’s just how the system works,” as local level bureaucrats try to impress upon their higher ups their own total commitment to the Party’s goals to win promotion.

“The goal of the national Communist Party is to create a total security state. They want to be able to cover every square inch of the country, to know everything that’s on people’s minds,” said Cain, who wrote a book on that aim titled “The Perfect Police State.”

Naturally, that crackdown has already made life more difficult for the few foreign journalists who remain in China, and this new tool to create alerts for those who dare to travel to Xinjiang could potentially put them at further risk. A correspondent for the LA Times was detained for four hours and assaulted while covering protests in China’s Inner Mongolia region in 2020.

News of the Songjiang project also coincides with new findings from the human-rights group Safeguard Defenders, showing that the Party has increased its use of exit bans to prevent foreign journalists, human-rights advocates, and others from leaving China. Its latest report, released today, points out that at least four foreign journalists have been subjected to such bans since 2018.

A spokesperson for the State Department told National Review, in response to questions about the Shanghai surveillance platform plans, that the U.S. calls on Chinese officials to ensure that journalists can report freely and that it “is deeply concerned with the increasingly harsh surveillance, harassment, and intimidation of journalists in the PRC.”

“The environment for foreign journalists working in the PRC — especially but not only those working for U.S. media organizations — has deteriorated dramatically in recent years, making it increasingly difficult for journalists still inside the country to operate or for foreign journalists to enter China,” the spokesperson also said. “Conversely, foreign journalists in the United States have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy press freedom, including media access that is not permitted in the PRC.”

Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, warned that the Chinese regime might even seek to export these techniques. “The Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance and harassment of foreign journalists attempting to report on the ongoing Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang only draws attention to its mafia-like behavior and contempt for human rights,” he said. “If we turn a blind eye, the Party’s techno-totalitarian surveillance and assault on press freedoms will not stay confined to China — the CCP’s dream is global media control.”

The role played by Alibaba, which did not respond to a request for comment, is also significant, with Rollet saying that the company “is enabling techno-authoritarianism at a worrying scale and needs to publicly explain itself.”

Cain said that as much as the e-commerce company has itself been beaten around by the Party, including through the detention of founder Jack Ma, Alibaba is fully compliant with its orders: “Whenever we’re doing business with Chinese companies, we have to assume that they are spying on us because they are required to and we have to assume that they’re doing horrible things to people back in China, because the government requires them to do so.”