For the past 25 years, top American tech firms including IBM, Cisco, and NVIDIA helped build China’s digital police state, an Associated Press investigation revealed Tuesday. The report shows these companies sold billions of dollars in technology that became the foundation of China’s vast surveillance network.
This equipment enabled severe human rights abuses, from the “Great Firewall” to predictive policing systems used in the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Despite years of warnings, these firms provided the tools that allow Chinese authorities to crush dissent and monitor millions of citizens.
The story of petitioner Yang Guoliang in The Washington Post illustrates the human cost. Targeted for protesting a land seizure, his family is trapped in a digital cage. “Every move in my own home is monitored. Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”
This pervasive monitoring is a direct result of the state’s technological architecture, largely built with American innovation.
Silicon Valley’s Blueprint for a Digital Cage
The technological foundation of this control is the “Golden Shield Project,” an initiative started in 1998. Planned in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, its creation was accelerated by the government’s fear of online organizing by groups like the China Democracy Party. The project’s ideological basis was Deng Xiaoping’s mantra: when you open a window for fresh air, you must expect some flies to get in.
U.S. firms were key partners in building this flytrap. The AP investigation based on classified documents revealed IBM worked with Chinese defense contractor Huadi to design the core policing system.
Oracle provided database software, Cisco supplied networking gear, and Intel and NVIDIA delivered the powerful chips essential for processing vast amounts of surveillance data.
This was not a passive commercial relationship. Marketing materials show these companies actively pitched their technology to Chinese police using party catchphrases like “stability maintenance” to promote tools for crushing protest.
Leaked presentations from the time show Cisco promoted its products’ ability to identify and block content from the Falun Gong religious group.
The Golden Shield evolved into a two-pronged apparatus of control. Its most famous component is the “Great Firewall,” which censors the domestic internet by blocking access to foreign websites and filtering search results.
Its other arm is “Skynet,” a physical surveillance network designed to be “omnipresent, fully networked, working all the time, and fully controllable”.
By 2019, the Skynet system had grown to include an estimated 200 million cameras, with plans to reach over 600 million by 2020.
This vast web of hardware, powered by American-designed chips and software, created the technical backbone for a new era of automated social control.
Predictive Policing and Persecution in Xinjiang
The most severe application of this technology is concentrated in the Xinjiang region, where the government has waged a brutal campaign against Turkic Muslims.
Following the 2009 protests, Chinese officials concluded their existing surveillance was inadequate, creating an opportunity for US firms to pitch more advanced systems to “ensure urban safety and stability.”
The result was the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a big data system designed to track and flag individuals for potential detention. The AP investigation links the IJOP’s architecture to IBM’s i2 police surveillance software, which was sold to Xinjiang police by a Chinese partner firm, Landasoft.
The platform aggregates data from countless sources—phone calls, travel records, biometrics, and app usage—to identify “suspicious” individuals.
A leaked list of over 2,000 detainees from Aksu prefecture, analyzed by Human Rights Watch, reveals the shockingly mundane and lawful behaviors the IJOP flags as pre-criminal.
The system targeted individuals for actions as minor as receiving calls from relatives abroad, using the file-sharing app Zapya, or simply being “born after the 1980s” and thus deemed “untrustworthy.”
Other reasons for detention included studying the Quran without state permission, having a long beard, or traveling outside of Aksu. In one case, a woman was detained for having once stayed overnight in another city in 2013.
As Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang explained, “the Aksu List provides further insights into how China’s brutal repression of Xinjiang’s Turkic Muslims is being turbocharged by technology.”
This automated repression, which had the power to trigger arrests, horrified those who witnessed its creation.
Former Xinjiang government engineer Nureli Abliz, upon seeing the system’s capabilities, remarked, “I thought then that this was the end of humanity.”
The system’s goal is pre-emptive control, where individuals are detained until their loyalty can be enforced. This practice contradicts Chinese claims of precision counter-terrorism and instead points to a system of automated persecution based on everyday life.
The Great Firewall’s Global Shadow
The surveillance state’s reach now extends far beyond China’s borders, targeting diaspora members who dare to speak out.
A recent Human Rights Watch report detailed how Chinese authorities harass and intimidate critics living abroad, a practice known as transnational repression.
In Japan, activists from Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia reported that police contacted their relatives back in China to pressure them into silence.
The tactics are insidious and personal. One activist from Inner Mongolia, who protested China’s language policies, had police visit his family and demand they sign documents promising he would cease his activities.
Another found his family cut off all contact after similar intimidation. This long-arm policing aims to export censorship and fear, effectively silencing dissent globally.
While U.S. sanctions began to restrict technology sales in 2019, the core infrastructure remains active, often maintained through ubiquitous contracts for American software and hardware from Dell, HP, and Oracle.
In a significant recent development, the U.S. has further tightened export controls on AI and surveillance technology to China.
However, the model has already been exported. Having learned from Silicon Valley, China is now a leading global supplier of its own surveillance technologies to other authoritarian regimes like Iran and Russia.
This “Digital Silk Road” risks creating digital cages worldwide, built on the blueprint first drafted by American companies.
The consequences of this technological proliferation are profound. As former Xinjiang civil servant Liu Yuliang, who witnessed the system’s cruelty firsthand, warned, “this technology has no emotions. But in the hands of a government that doesn’t respect the law, it becomes a tool for evil.”
