US tech companies enabled the surveillance and detention of hundreds of thousands in China

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-tech-companies-enabled-surveillance-detention-hundreds-thousands-125384403

US tech companies enabled the surveillance and detention of hundreds of thousands in China

An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known

ByDAKE KANG Associated Press and YAEL GRAUER Associated Press
September 8, 2025, 9:04 PM

BEIJING -- The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks.

By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.

Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state — a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison.

Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.

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…Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield”

… Dell and a Chinese surveillance firm promoted a “military-grade” AI-powered laptop with “all-race recognition” on Dell's official WeChat account in 2019.

… biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific’s website marketed DNA kits to the Chinese police as “designed” for the Chinese population, including “ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans.”

… more …