US Money Is Funding The Technology Behind China’s Surveillance State. Ben Kothe / BuzzFeed News; Getty Images HONG KONG — Princeton University and the US’s largest public pension plan are among a number of stateside organizations funding technology behind the Chinese government’s unprecedented surveillance of some 11 million people of Muslim ethnic minorities. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in political reeducation camps in the country’s northwest region of Xinjiang, identifying them, in part, with facial recognition software created by two companies: SenseTime, based in Hong Kong, and Beijing’s Megvii.
A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that US universities, private foundations, and retirement funds entrusted their money to investors that, in turn, plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into these two startups over the last three years. Megvii told BuzzFeed News its “solutions are not designed or customized to target or label ethnic groups. Sen. Bloomberg / Getty Images. How China rips off the iPhone and reinvents Android - The Verge - Pocket.
2018 will go down as the year when it became impossible to ignore the increasing advancements of Chinese smartphone hardware, from superlative camera arrays and super-speed charging to in-display fingerprint scanners and creative ways to stretch the display across as much of the front of the phone as possible. In a year that has seen Apple, Samsung, and now Google deliver iterative design updates to their flagship phones, devices like the Oppo Find X, Huawei P20 Pro, and Vivo Nex will be particularly memorable for their sheer gadgety appeal. That doesn’t mean, however, that they’re always the best devices to actually use. Many experienced Android users in the West who try out Chinese phones, including reviewers here at The Verge, often find themselves unable to get over an immediate stumbling block: the software. For the unfamiliar, Chinese phone software can be garish, heavy-handed, and quite unlike anything installed on phones that are popular outside of Asia.
Shenzhen, China. Yanxi Palace: Why China turned against its most popular show. China is racing ahead in 5G. Here’s what that means. The Fangshan district is a quiet outer borough in southwest Beijing. Until recently it was best known for its petrochemical and steel plants. Today, this neighborhood of sleepy apartment buildings and train tracks is part of a mobile revolution enveloping cities across China: the world’s biggest rollout of 5G technology. Last fall, the Fangshan government and China Mobile, the country’s largest mobile operator, outfitted a 6-mile (10-kilometer) road with 5G cell towers. Since September 2018, companies have been using the connectivity to test wireless communications between autonomous vehicles and their surroundings. The 5G network transmits data from car sensors, roadside sensors, and video cameras installed above the road to a local data center, which analyzes the information and sends it back to the vehicles to help them navigate.
How does 5G make this possible? Sign up for The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology China knows this all too well. The man turning China into a quantum superpower. On September 29, 2017, a Chinese satellite known as Micius made possible an unhackable videoconference between Vienna and Beijing, two cities half a world apart. As it whisked across the night sky at 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers) per hour, the satellite beamed down a small data packet to a ground station in Xinglong, a couple of hours’ drive to the northeast of Beijing. Less than an hour later, the satellite passed over Austria and dispatched another data packet to a station near the city of Graz.
The packets were encryption keys for securing data transmissions. What made this event so special was that the keys distributed by the satellite were encoded in photons in a delicate quantum state. Any attempt to intercept them would have collapsed that state, destroying the information and signaling the presence of a hacker. This means they were far more secure than keys sent as classical bits—a stream of electrical or optical pulses representing 1s and 0s that can be read and copied. How Google took on China—and lost. Google's first foray into Chinese markets was a short-lived experiment. Google China’s search engine was launched in 2006 and abruptly pulled from mainland China in 2010 amid a major hack of the company and disputes over censorship of search results.
But in August 2018, the investigative journalism website The Intercept reported that the company was working on a secret prototype of a new, censored Chinese search engine, called Project Dragonfly. Amid a furor from human rights activists and some Google employees, US Vice President Mike Pence called on the company to kill Dragonfly, saying it would “strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.” In mid-December, The Intercept reported that Google had suspended its development efforts in response to complaints from the company's own privacy team, who learned about the project from the investigative website's reporting.
The right thing to do? The sudden reversal blindsided Chinese officials. China’s Economy, by the Numbers, Is Worse Than It Looks. Are you a robot? Are you a robot? China and the Geopolitics of the Far Side of the Moon. How China could dominate science - Red moon rising. China’s Bizarre Program to Keep Activists in Check. Recently, the Beijing police took my brother sightseeing again. Nine days, two guards, chauffeured tours through a national park that’s a World Heritage site, visits to Taoist temples and to the Three Gorges, expenses fully covered, all courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security.
The point was to get him out of town during the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, held in early September. The capital had to be in a state of perfect order; no trace of trouble was permissible. And Zha Jianguo, a veteran democracy activist, is considered a professional troublemaker. While President Xi Jinping played host to African dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People, the police played host to my big brother at various scenic spots in the province of Hubei, about a thousand kilometres away. This practice is known as bei lüyou, “to be touristed.” Jianguo became a tourist only in recent years, but he has been a target of governmental attention for more than two decades.
“No,” Jianguo replied. China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor. China’s Debt Bomb. It’s been called a mountain, a horror movie, a bomb and a treadmill to hell. To doomsayers, China's $34 trillion pile of public and private debt is an explosive threat to the global economy. Or maybe it's just a manageable byproduct of the boom that created the world’s second-biggest economy. Either way, the buildup has been breathtaking, with borrowing having quadrupled in seven years by one estimate. (China doesn't give a complete tally). President Xi Jinping has taken note, pushing authorities to announce a slew of measures that target risks lurking in the financial system.
The challenge is how to wean the country off its debt drip without intensifying an economic slowdown. Since China is a key driver of global growth, it's a matter of concern for everybody. The Situation Even with the government focus on deleveraging, Chinese borrowing rose 14 percent in 2017, ballooning to 266 percent of gross domestic product, from 162 percent in 2008. The Background The Argument The Reference Shelf. China’s Great Leap Backward. In the last 40 years, China has racked up a long list of remarkable accomplishments. Between 1978 and 2013, the Chinese economy grew by an average rate of 10 percent a year, producing a tenfold increase in average adult income.
All that growth helped some 800 million people lift themselves out of poverty; along the way, China also reduced its infant mortality rate by 85 percent and raised life expectancy by 11 years. What made these achievements all the more striking is that the Chinese government accomplished them while remaining politically repressive—something that historical precedent and political theory suggest is very, very difficult. No wonder, then, that the China scholar Orville Schell describes this record as “one of the most startling miracles of economic development in world history.” The miraculous quality of China’s achievements makes what is happening in the country today especially tragic—and alarming.
No longer. Such predictions should worry everyone. No longer. China's hidden camps. Choice page. China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No Clear End in Sight. Last summer, online links between China’s western Xinjiang region and the rest of the world began to go dark. Uighurs, who make up the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, started cutting friends and family members abroad from their contacts on WeChat, the dominant online communication platform in China. Many asked their family members not to call them by phone. The family of one Uighur I spoke to smuggled a final communication through the chat function integrated into a video game. In 2009, the government had shut down the internet entirely for almost a year, but this was something different.
Entire minority groups were cutting themselves off from the outside world, one contact deletion at a time. As Uighurs were disappearing from cross-border conversations, distinctive new building complexes began cropping up throughout the region: large construction projects surrounded by double fences and guard towers, all clearly visible on satellite imagery. A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag.