With Persecution of Falun Gong, Huawei Develops Tools of Repression

By Jennifer Zeng

December 10, 2018 Updated: December 10, 2018

News Analysis

WASHINGTON—While the West has only recently recognized the potential security threat posed by Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, some China insiders have long known that the company is part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.

Huawei toes the party line very closely on issues including, for example, the persecution of Falun Gong, a peaceful meditation and spiritual practice similar in some ways to Buddhism. In cooperating with that persecution, Huawei has developed tools that should be of concern to everyone around the world, not just the practitioners of Falun Gong in China.

Censoring and Spying

Huawei has taken far more consequential actions regarding the persecution of Falun Gong than simply policing its own employees. It has helped put in place the tools used by the Chinese regime to track Chinese citizens and censor what information they can access, thus enabling the persecution.

A 172-page internal document from Huawei, written in 2015, was leaked this year and circulated on the internet. The file was entitled “VCM (video content management) Operation Guide” and was used to train the Chinese regime’s internet police on how to monitor, analyze, and process video content in real time. The police were expected to send out alerts should they find anything “suspicious.”

Social Credit Scores Going International

The Skynet System identifies an individual through facial recognition technology and locates the person’s information in a state database. That database now gives each person a “social credit” score that indicates the degree to which the individual aligns with the regime’s priorities.

The competence Huawei has developed in establishing this vast system may be used to collect data outside China.

Yu Chao, a U.S. system engineer, said that the international community should be very worried about the possibility of Huawei collecting mass data on people from other countries via their devices and networks. This information can then be used to compile a social credit score on non-Chinese as well.

“The gloomy picture is, although the CCP won’t use Americans’ ‘social credit scores’ to stop them from buying airplane tickets, they can gain very deep knowledge of virtually everything of someone who is in their database, and use this knowledge when needed,” Yu said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/with-persecution-of-falun-gong-huawei-develops-tools-of-repression_2735336.html