The Chinese party-state engages in data collection on a massive scale as a means of generating information to enhance state security—and, crucially, the political security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—across multiple domains. The party-state intends to shape, manage and control its global operating environment so that public sentiment is favourable to its own interests. The party’s interests are prioritised over simply the Chinese state’s interests or simply the Chinese people’s interests. The effort requires continuous expansion of the party’s power overseas because, according to its own articulation of its threat perceptions, external risks to its power are just as likely—if not more likely—to emerge from outside the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) borders as from within.
This report explains how the party-state’s tech-enhanced authoritarianism is expanding globally. The effort doesn’t always involve distinctly coercive and overtly invasive technology, such as surveillance cameras. In fact, it often relies on technologies that provide useful services. Those services are designed to bring efficiency to everyday governance and convenience to everyday life. The problem is that it’s not only the customer deploying these technologies—notably those associated with ‘smart cities’, such as ‘internet of things’ (IoT) devices—that derives benefit from their use. Whoever has the opportunity to access the data a product generates and collects can derive value from the data. How the data is processed, and then used, depends on the intent of the actor processing it.
http://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/15185352/Hoffman-banner.png499789nathanhttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgnathan2019-10-14 06:00:002024-12-15 18:58:15Engineering global consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s data-driven power expansion
Mapping China’s Technology Giants is a multi-year project by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre that maps the overseas expansion of key Chinese technology companies. The project, first published in April 2019, is now being re-launched in June 2021 with new research reports, a new website and an enormous amount of new and updated content.
This data-driven online project – and the accompanying research products – fill a research and policy gap by building understanding about the global trajectory and impact of China’s largest companies working across the Internet, telecommunications, AI, surveillance, e-commerce, finance, biotechnology, big data, cloud computing, smart city and social media sectors.
Two new research reports accompany the re-launch
Mapping China’s Technology Giants: Supply Chains and the Global Data Ecosystem Most of the 27 companies tracked by our Mapping China’s Technology Giants project are heavily involved in the collection and processing of vast quantities of personal and organisational data. Their global business operations depend on the flow of vast amounts of data, often governed by the data privacy laws of multiple jurisdictions. The Chinese party-state is ensuring that it can derive strategic value and benefit from these companies’ global operations. We assess interactions between the People’s Republic of China’s political agenda-setting, efforts to shape international technical standards, technical capabilities, and use of data as a strategic resource. We argue this ‘Data Ecosystem’ will have major implications for the effectiveness of data protection laws and notions of digital supply-chain security.
Reining in China’s Technology Giants Since the launch of ASPI ICPC’s Mapping China’s Technology Giants project in April 2019, the Chinese technology companies we canvassed have gone through a tumultuous period. While most were buoyed by the global Covid-19 pandemic, which stimulated demand for technology services around the world, many were buffeted by an unprecedented onslaught of sanctions from abroad, before being engulfed in a regulatory storm at home. This report describes the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing China–US strategic and technological competition, and a changing Chinese domestic regulatory environment on the 27 Chinese Technology Giants we cover on our map.
Our Map includes over 1,400 new entries, totalling over 3,900 global entries. These are populated with up to 15 categories of data, totalling 38,000+ data points. Existing entries were updated to reflect new changes.
Our map tracks more than 130 donations, 80 of these are Covid-19 monetary and medical donations from ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba.
Biotechnology company BGI saw profits surge in 2020 as Covid-19 spread around the world. Our map now contains 100 datapoints of presence for BGI including commercial partnerships, Covid-19 related donations, investments, joint ventures, MoU agreements, overseas offices, research partnerships and subsidiaries.
We have tracked the expansion of Hikvision, Dahua and Uniview as overseas demand for their temperature screening products increased during Covid-19. The map contains 65 data points of overseas presence relating to Covid-19 for these three companies, including donations, commercial partnerships, and surveillance equipment.
Our ‘Company Briefs’ include new ‘Privacy Policies’ and ‘Covid-19 Impact’ sections. We’ve also updated each existing overview, and of particular note are updates to the ‘Activities in Xinjiang’ and ‘Party-state Activities’ sections.
We’re introducing a new product: ‘Thematic Snapshots’. These combine company overview content across the four thematic areas named above. They are designed to serve as a user-friendly guide for the journalists, researchers, and policy makers who use our website.
Visitors can now explore our data in two ways, using either the Map or Data Listing pages. These display the same results in different formats depending on a users’ preference.
Click the ‘show Our Highlights Only’ to see the map entries ASPI staff have flagged as data points of particular interest. For these entries, we have undertaken additional analysis or recommend further investigation.
For more about this multi-year project visit the About page of the China Tech Map website.
The Team
The Mapping China’s Technology Giants research project is a huge team effort, comprising;
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is pleased to announce Peter Mattis – Research Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation – as a distinguished ASPI fellow for 2019.
Peter will be spending the next month at ASPI working with the Institute’s different China specialists on a range of research projects.
Peter will also be a keynote speaker at ASPI’s inaugural China masterclass being held on 15 April in Canberra (almost sold out) and 17 April in Melbourne (tickets still available).
Executive Director Peter Jennings says: “ASPI is delighted to attract someone of Peter’s analytical calibre to spend a full month at our institute. Peter has made an enormous contribution to building the world’s knowledge of how the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and China’s intelligence systems operate – both at home and around the world. Peter’s work spans across a broad range of topics, from better understanding PLA activity in cyberspace, to Chinese party-state influence operations, espionage and military modernisation. ASPI is looking forward to hosting Peter so that he can continue some of this important work over the next month”
Peter was formerly a Fellow in the China Program at The Jamestown Foundation where he edited China Brief and was an international affairs analyst for the US Government. He received his M.A. in Security Studies from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and earned his B.A. in Political Science and Asian Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle. He also previously worked as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Asian Research in its Strategic Asia and Northeast Asian Studies programs.
Peter is in Australia from now until 18 April. For media enquiries please contact reneejones@aspi.org.au / 0400 424 323
http://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svg00markohttp://aspi.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/16232551/ASPI-CMYK_SVG.svgmarko2019-03-18 17:14:002024-11-15 17:17:25Top US China specialist Peter Mattis announced as ASPI distinguished fellow
