Government surveillance is one of the concerning trends revealed in Open Doors’ 2021 World Watch List of countries where Christians experience the highest levels of persecution.
David Curry, CEO of Open Doors, called surveillance technology the “greatest threat to human rights today,” and nowhere is that truer than in China. China has reentered the list’s top 20 (No. 17 this year) after ranking No. 23 in 2020 and No. 27 in 2019.
Chris Meserole, director of research and policy at the Brookings Institution, also expressed concern over the spread of this surveillance technology to foreign governments beyond China.
“It’s not a problem that’s going to stay in China,” Meserole warned. The technology “enables a regime to ban private forms of religion. So there’s certain countries, you can’t wear a cross or you can’t wear a yarmulke or you can’t wear a hijab.”
GEOLOCATION AND CAMERAS
China has access to geolocation technologies and cameras that track people in real time, Meserole continued. America should be “raising the alarm bell” because this technology will “have material impact on the ability of people to believe and worship what they would like to.”
“The Chinese state has a very extensive capability to monitor all the WeChat messages that you might send, for example, and there are well-documented examples of religious minorities in China being arrested and even detained by virtue of the religious … images that they send,” Meserole cautioned.
Once a person is arrested, the Chinese government uses their contact list to detain more people “regardless of whether they really have any other evidence that they may do something,” Meserole said.
In April 2014, Pastor Jonathan Liu said Shanghai police visited his home and harassed him, telling him not to spread photos of crosses.
They visited four more times, and some Christians now have to register their identification and phone number.
“So the government will suppress these Christians, especially in some little cities,” Liu said.
SPYING SOFTWARE
Facial recognition software, iris scanning, QR codes, scanning codes on homes — all are used to monitor the comings and goings of Muslims, said Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs.
Abbas stressed that China’s export of technology means what is happening to the Uyghurs today will happen to other people groups tomorrow.
Across China, government officials have normalized facial recognition software. Those arriving in Beijing get their faces scanned. Even some vending machines scan faces, and there are cameras in state-sponsored churches and mosques.
Meserole mentioned SenseTime, a company whose “mandate is to monitor 100,000 video feeds in real time, across an entire city so that even as you’re going from mosque to mosque they can track you in real time.”
Open Doors reported the country has at least 415 million facial recognition cameras in use.
“There’s really no other country that can match the sheer scale of surveillance technologies that China has developed and deployed,” Messerole said. “They’re far and away the leading developer of those technologies and implementers of those technologies today.”
https://www.thealabamabaptist.org/surveillance-in-china-poses-threat-to-religious-groups/
