China – ubisurv

Smart Cities in China, Taiwan and Singapore

I’ve just been awarded a year-long SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant, which is surveying and summarizing the literature on (post-)smart cities from China, Taiwan and Singapore, in both Chinese and English languages.

Smart digital technologies are challenging the way we manage and govern our cities, and our imagination of their futures. The combination of technological, policy and social innovation in smart and now, post-smart cities generates both common global concerns and issues of policy-learning, co-operation and competition for Canada. China and the sinophone world are at the core of this cooperation and competition conundrum, with China being one of the largest developers of smart cities and smart technology in the world. This project will create a comprehensive database of national smart and post-smart city academic literature, national and sub-national policies and plans in Chinese and English, for China, Taiwan, and Singapore, with literature and policy summaries and reviews, and a program of government and policy and seminars. The work will be conducted by a combined team of native Chinese and English speakers at CSS/Lab. It is aimed at orienting Canadian policy on the governance of cities and technology, nationally and globally.

These three nation-states are vital to understanding the future governance of post-smart cities. China is a driving force of the worldwide market in the smart city sector, making up 13.8% of the global market in 2023, and estimated to grow from $103Bn US in 2023 and is to $550Bn US in 2030 These three nation-states are vital to understanding the future governance of post-smart cities. China is a driving force of the worldwide market in the smart city sector, making up 13.8% of the global market in 2023, and estimated to grow from $103Bn US in 2023 and is to $550Bn US in 2030 (according to Grand View Research), and with three cities in the Top 20 of the 2024 IMD Smart City Index (and a total of 10 in the Top 100). Singapore is the model for many other developers of post-smart cities, ranked 5^th in the world in the 2024 IMD Smart City Index, and is itself a massive market for its size at almost 2% of the global total and estimated to grow from $14.4Bn US in 2023 to $102.0Bn US in 2030 (Grand View Research). Finally, Taiwan offers innovative policies on connected citizenship and state management of data (Chung et al. 2021), with Taipei ranked 16^th in the 2024 IMD Smart City Index (IMD 2024). In contrast, despite some high-profile policies like the Smart Cities Challenge program, there are no Canadian Cities in the Top 20, or even the Top 40, of the 2024 IMD Smart City Index.

There are two types of literature involved here in two different domains.

The first is scholarship. The applicant is already conducting extensive literature reviews of the anglophone and francophone literatures on smart and post-smart cities. Both the active planning and construction of smart and post-smart cities, and the study of smart and post-smart cities, are booming in the sinophone (Chinese-language) world, yet in the west, we are limited to presentations and publications by authors who have chosen to publish in conference proceedings and journals in languages other than Chinese, mainly English. We, in Canada, are therefore missing a great deal of research, which would also tell us more about sinophone understandings of the future governance of cities. This project would carry out a systematic cataloging of the Chinese-language literature on smart and post-smart cities, including translation of all titles, abstracts and keywords.

The second is policy. The project also proposes to collate, catalog and summarize national and sub-national policy documents on smart and post-smart cities from China, Taiwan and Singapore, the three predominantly (or at least, partly) culturally Chinese governments. This project would carry out a systematic cataloging of Chinese, Taiwanese and Singaporean policy literature, that is policy documents, white papers, official discussion documents, national plans and competitions and so on, concerning smart and post-smart cities, including translation of all titles, summaries and keywords. Where summaries do not exist, they will be provided.

Together this project offers vital resources that are important for our collective global imagination, but also in the immediate term for orienting Canadian domestic policy on the governance of cities and technology, nationally and globally.

Sky Net: Hunan’s video surveillance state

Never mind the smog that obscures the view from the cameras, China is pressing ahead with the construction of the most comprehensive and integrated surveillance of public space in the world. The latest report comes from Hunan province, where “26,022 cameras and 103 surveillance rooms” have been installed. What is particularly interesting, however is that the police intend to integrate “186,000 private cameras owned by residential communities, shopping malls and private enterprises” into the system. Whether this will be successful or not, given the vast differences in analog and digital systems and other compatibility and standards issues, is another matter, but few states have even tried to combine public and private video surveillance systems in this way.

Interestingly the case offered for the effectiveness of the system is as sparse as that to be found in the west, which is particularly strange given that it comes from the police themselves and they could have made it seem a lot more effective: apparently the cameras have “provided clues for more than 2,100 criminal cases” – or less than 1 for every ten cameras, and even more vaguely “has prevented and discouraged crime in some residential communities”. I’m sure that it’s worth the money to the state in terms of keeping a watch on political dissent and any sign of unofficial public politics however.

The punchline is the name of the system: “Sky Net”. Either the Hunan government are not great fans of the Terminator films, or they have a very highly developed and bleak sense of irony…

Through a glass, darkly…

There are many reasons why video surveillance (or closed-circuit television – CCTV) works less well than its advocates claim, and here is another to add to the list from China, the country with probably the most rapidly expanding surveillance infrastructure in the world, and the reason is: air pollution.

china_smog — Low visibility in Chinese cities due to smog (South China Morning Post)

According to the South China Morning Post, the current record levels of smog in several major cities is leading to visibility of below three metres. It makes video surveillance, even with infrared or other night vision capabilities, useless, and there are no easy solutions.

The Chinese state is so paranoid about internal security, particularly following the recent apparent terrorist attack in Beijing, that it is even considering installing imaging radar systems, more normally found in battlefields and satellite systems. Apparently, dealing with either the root causes of the pollution or the ‘security’ issues (mainly political discontent across China’s massive and diverse land area) is not on the cards, so China continues to stay on the surveillance technology treadmill…

(thanks to Matt Wei for bringing this to my attention)

East Asia Drone Wars

In one of my only posts last year, around this time, I argued that 2012 would be in the ‘year of the drone’ – and it certainly lived up to that. But we’re still only just beginning. This is already the decade of the drone. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are going to be everywhere in the coming few years (and of course not just in international disputes – I am writing about the spread of domestic surveillance drones for a major report on Surveillance in Canada that we’re producing right now).

Media outlets are reporting that the dispute over maritime territory between China and Japan is ramping up through the use of UAVs. At the moment both countries rely heavily on conventional naval or fisheries surveillance vessels, which are limited in terms of speed of deployment and numbers. However, surveillance drones could enable a more consistent presence over the disputed islands (and more importantly the sea around them, whose fisheries and below seabed mineral resources are the real underlying issue here).

However, there are big differences in the politics and the political economy of each state’s strategic trajectory here. Japan is relying on its longstanding ‘alliance’ with the USA, and is likely to purchase US-made Northrop-Grumman Global Hawks, further emphasizing the military dependency Japan still has on the USA. China, on the other hand, is speeding up development of its own UAVs, in multiple different models. US industry sources seem more worried by alleged breaches of intellectual property rights in the drones’ design than by strategic issues – but of course, China has almost certainly had access to both hardware and software from downed US drones, which is all part of what some analysts are terming a ‘drone race’ with the USA.

and the Chinese version (Chengdu Aircraft Co.)

But this isn’t just about surveillance. Like the USA’s models, many of China’s UAVs are armed or can be weaponized very easily, and again like the USA, China has also been looking to export markets – most recently, Pakistan has been discussing the purchase of several armed drones from China, following the distinct lack of success in its own UAV development program.

The Global Hawks that Japan is buying are not armed, but this doesn’t mean that Japan is acting less aggressively here or will not in future used armed drones. Despite the post-WW2 US-imposed but popular ‘pacifist’ constitution of the country, the recent return to power of rightist PM Shinzo Abe might will mean both more heated rhetoric over territorial claims and attempts to increase the of the country’s self-defence forces: a review of Japanese military spending – with a view to increasing it – was announced just yesterday.

Drones would seem to be a politically popular choice in this regard as they do not involve putting Japanese lives at risk, or at least not directly; however the longer term outcomes any drone war in East Asia would not likely favour a Japan whose regional economic and political power is influence declining relative to China’s.

Guess who likes the UK’s proposals to control the Internet?

In the wake of the riots, several British Conservative MPs, and indeed PM David Cameron himself, have suggested a harsher regime of state control of both messenger services and social networks. Their suggestions have attracted widespread derision from almost everybody who either knows something about the Internet and communications more broadly, or who places any value on freedom of speech, assembly and communication and regards these things as foundational to any democratic society.

However, the a yet vague proposals have gained support from one quarter: China. The Chinese state-controlled media have suggested that the Conservative Party’s undemocratic suggestions prove that the Chinese state was right all along about controlling the Internet and that now these events are causing liberal democracies to support the Chinese model of highly regulated provision (via Boing Boing).

This is pretty much what I have been suggesting is happening for the last 2 or 3 years – see here, here, here and here. It is just that now, the pretense of democratic communication is being dropped by western governments. And just in case David Cameron doesn’t get it – and he really does not appear to right now, no, it is not a good thing that the Chinese government likes your ideas: it makes you look undemocratic and authoritarian.

The Total Surveillance Society?

Advanced visual surveillance has become prevalent in most developed nations but, being restricted by inconvenient things like democracy and accountability (even if they are not as strong as some would like) and police and local authority funding, such surveillance remains patchy even where it is widespread.

The Chinese state, however, suffers from none of these inconvenient restrictions. Free from democracy, accountability, and with a buoyant economy still largely connected to the Communist Party, it is able to put in place surveillance systems beyond the wildest dreams of the most paranoid western administrators. The target of the new wave of surveillance is internal political unrest, particularly in separatist Tibetan Buddhist and Muslim areas of the massive nation.

Associated Press is reporting official internal announcements about how Urumqi, capital of the Uighur Muslim area of Xinjiang, which saw extensive anti-government protests last year, will be blanketed by surveillance systems. According to the report:

40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective shells have already been installed in the region, with 17,000 in Urumqi itself
3,400 buses, 4,400 streets, 270 schools and 100 shopping malls are already covered
the aim is for surveillance to be “seamless”, with no blind spots in sensitive areas of the city (and this includes in particular, religious sites)
5,000 new police officers have been recruited

This is part of a wider ‘Safe City’ strategy – in this context, even more of a euphemistic description that the same words would be in the west – that will see 10 million cameras being installed across the country. Ths numbers keep growing all the time: the last time that I reported on this, the estimate was less than 3 million ! IMS Consultants last year estimated that the Chinese video surveillance market was $1.4 billion in 2009, and that this will grow to over $3.5 billion by 2014. China is now the single largest market for video surveillance in the world.

UofT Researchers uncover Chinese Internet espionage system

The Globe and Mail is reporting today that researchers based at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, along with two private internet security consultancies, SecDev and the Shadowserver Foundation, have uncovered a worldwide network of automated intrusion programs (or botnet) based in China. The report called Shadows in the Cloud describes how over 1300 infected computers containing information related to all kinds of material from the Dalai Lama, the Indian government and US security were linked back to Chinese sources. The authors include Greg Walton who wrote the excellent early report on China’s ‘Golden Shield’ Internet surveillance and censorship system a few years ago. It can’t be said for certain that this was a Chinese state operation: as with the attacks on Estonia from Russian sources back in 2007, suspicions just as much centre on ‘patriotic hackers’, who are just doing this out of a sense of outrage at opposition to their country’s leadership. And no doubt, this is far from the only nationally-oriented botnet system.

SHADOWS IN THE CLOUD: Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0

Google does the right thing, but…

Google is, as I type this, closing down its Chinese site as the first stage of its withdrawal of service from mainland China, in response to numerous attacks on the company’s computers from hackers allegedly connected to the Chinese state and ongoing demands to provide a censored service with which they felt they could not comply. The company claims that Chinese users will still be able to use Google, only through the special Hong Kong website, http://www.google.com.hk, which for historical reasons falls outside the Chinese state’s Internet control regime. Whether this will mean that the site will actually be accessible to Chinese Net users is debateable. Some say they cannot access it already. There are also numerous ‘fake Google’ sites that have sprung up to try to make some fast cash out of the situation.

But there’s more to this of course. Google has been widely reported to have opened its doors to the US National Security Agency (NSA) in order, they say, to solve the hacking issue, but the NSA only get involved in matters of US national security – if Google is essentially saying it is effectively beholden to US intelligence policy and interests, I am not sure that this is a whole lot better than bowing to China. You can be sure as well, that once invited in, the NSA will insinuate themselves into the company. Having a proper official backdoor into Google would make things a lot easier for the NSA, especially in populating its shiny new data warehouse in Utah…

China calls for better international regulation of space

…it is the USA that effectively controls earth orbit. However many other emerging economies see no reason why this should be the case….

Following last week’s collision between an obsolete Russian military satellite and an US Iridium communications satellite, there has been a lot of discussion about the management of orbital space (or, more accurately, the lack of it). Orbital positions are managed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), but the effective control of orbital space is a matter of power projection – i.e.: which country can maintain a stronger and more pervasive presence in space. With the Russian program almost defunct, and European satellites limited in number, it is the USA that effectively controls earth orbit. However many other emerging economies see no reason why this should be the case. India now has a regular launch program and in particular China is massively expanding its space presence, even making noises about its ability to destroy satellites if necessary.

China seems now to be using this incident to sound out other countries and the international scientific community about a more coherent and comprehensive international management of orbital space. In an article published on the official English-language news site, Chinadaily, various senior Chinese scientists and People’s Daily journalists are quoted in favour of “establishing a system for the promotion of space safety is an important method of space traffic management”, through “long-term cooperation from the international community”, and perhaps even a “space traffic law”, although it is acknowledged that this is “still a very remote concept”.

The one organisation that is not going to like this at all is the US military. USSTRATCOM has absorbed the space power doctrine developed in the 1990s by USSPACECOM, which argued effectively that orbital space should be part of US military plans for ‘Full-Spectrum Dominance’ (FSD) and that international projects like the International Space Station would be tolerated only insofar as they could be ‘leveraged’ to US advantage. The US military wants to maintain the ‘ultimate high ground’ that dominance of earth orbit gives them, for communications, for surveillance, for weapons targeting. They are not even very keen on the EU Galileo project, the new and more technically-advanced rival to GPS (which is a US military system).

Just as with the discussion about internationalising management of the Internet and moving it beyond US government control, any suggestions of a more comprehensive international management of space are likely to be resisted even at the expense of logic and reason. The Chinese know this very well, and are being rather cleverly provocative. They are however, right.

Quiet in the Library! Controlling the Internet

For many supposedly liberal politicians and bureaucrats the Internet is just a library of information, and we all know that libraries must be quiet and orderly, used responsibly and under the supervision of trained librarians…

Just a quick one: Boing Boing covered the story of an Australian EFF information rights campaigner, Geordie Guy, who has received a death threat from supporters of the government´s plan to control the Internet – just like so many other states around the world.

Surveillance cameras in Dajuyuan, Shenzhen (Rolling Stone)

It is no accident that the EFF campaign in Australia makes reference to their government´s plan as a ‘great wall’. The first government to do this was, of course, China with its jīndùn gōngchéng (‘Golden Shield’) system which was exposed by Greg Walton.

As Naomi Klein´s more recent investigations have shown, it seems that western governments and companies are not only deeply involved with supplying equipment and expertise to China´s new surveillance state, but also see the development of the combined physical and virtual surveillance infrastructure being built by the authoritarian Chinese government as some kind of model for their own supposedly more liberal nations.

The Internet seems to worry all sorts of otherwise level-headed and well-meaning people. I was invited to speak at a recent conference in Finland on security in the Baltic states, and I got into a small argument with the rapporteur of one of the working groups, who said that one of their conclusions was that ‘we’ must stamp out hate-speech on the Internet. I asked the rapporteur how they would intend to do this without destroying the structures which enabled the creativity and freedom of the Net, and the response was that stamping out hate-speech was too important and just must be done. I suspect this is how a lot of supposedly liberal politicians and bureaucrats are thinking. For them the Internet is just a library of information, and we all know that libraries must be quiet and orderly, used responsibly and under the supervision of trained librarians. If enforcing order destroys everything that makes the Internet so revolutionary and so important, so what? Order must be maintained. There must be quiet in the library!