Ian Williams - Every Breath You Take - Featured in The Times and Sunday Times: Chinas New Tyranny

Ian Williams was foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News, based in Russia (19921995) and then Asia (19952006). He then joined NBC News as Asia Correspondent (20062015), when he was based in Bangkok and Beijing. As well as reporting from China over the last 25 years, he has also covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Ukraine. He won an Emmy and BAFTA awards for his discovery and reporting on the Serb detention camps during the war in Bosnia. He has a keen interest in the darker corners of the online world, more recently studying cyber security at Royal Holloway, University of London and Kings College, London. He has written two novels, the cyber thrillers Beijing Smog and Zero Days.

First published in 2021 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright Ian Williams 2021

The moral right of Ian Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 711 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

This book is the culmination of many years travelling and reporting from China, and I am very grateful to friends, colleagues and contacts for their help and insights along the way. They are too numerous to name individually, and many especially those still working or living in the Peoples Republic prefer anonymity. It is safer that way. Xi Jinpings China is an increasingly dangerous place for those who express critical opinions. This book is dedicated to those who still try.

I am indebted to the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Department of War Studies at Kings College, London, where my studies after returning to the UK enabled me to better understand the surveillance technologies that sustain Xis rule. I am also grateful to the British diplomat I met on one of my first visits to Beijing. Anybody who claims to understand China is misinformed, he gruffly announced between large gulps of beer. That spurred me on. Yes, China is complex, but understanding the reality of Xis China and the threat it poses is more important than ever.

Thanks are also due to Hugh Andrew of Birlinn, who immediately recognised the importance of this book; to my editor, Andrew Simmons, for his deft touch and expertise; and to my agent, Andrew Lownie, for his enthusiasm and encouragement throughout. Lastly, I am grateful for the support of my family, and their no-nonsense feedback.

Ian Williams
March 2021

When a novel coronavirus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, the Communist Party covered up the outbreak and persecuted those who sought to tell the truth. Not until 20 January 2020 did officials admit publicly what doctors had suspected for weeks that Covid-19 was spreading from person to person. Three days after that admission, the authorities quarantined Wuhan, sealing off and shutting down the city. But even then, they continued to drag their feet on sharing crucial information with the international community; it was not until mid-February that a full World Health Organization delegation with international experts was allowed to visit Wuhan. The delays and a seemingly wilful lack of transparency cost the world time, and countless lives.

Chinas initial response was depressingly familiar; what followed was less so. As the lockdown spread to other Chinese cities and regions, the Communist Party put on a chilling demonstration of a new sort of power. It deployed the full force of a surveillance state that Xi Jinping has been constructing since he became Party leader in 2012, tapping into a trove of data on the movements and behaviour of Chinas 1.4 billion people all complemented by a casual brutality towards those who resisted quarantine after being flagged by the Partys hungry algorithms.

The surveillance tools ranged from a vast network of facial recognition and thermal imaging cameras calibrated for face coverings, to smartphone tracking, as well as fine-grained analyses of social media behaviour, and the monitoring of social interactions. Freedom of movement was determined by a colour-coded smartphone app the traffic light app, as it became known. The program crunched the data and awarded its user a red, amber or green code according to its determination of infection risk. If you were green you could move around; red meant immediate quarantine. The code had to be presented at checkpoints that blanketed the country even in taxis, and at the entrances to shops and apartment blocks where automated readers checked the code and sucked data from the smartphone. Drones swooped down on those not wearing masks or who lingered for too long outside, ordering them to obey the rules. Covid-19 gave this Orwellian system its day in the sun; with more than 500 million people in China under travel restrictions by mid-February, it could be field-tested on a massive scale and all in the name of tackling a health emergency.

By mid-March, the Party claimed to have largely brought the virus under control, though by then it was rapidly spreading internationally. The early weeks of the outbreak in China had seen a rare outbreak of open criticism on social media and the emergence of a brave band of citizen journalists, determined to discover what was really happening. But now the Party moved to silence its critics, rounding up and jailing the more outspoken, stepping up censorship and closing social-media accounts. Party propaganda outlets proclaimed Xi Jinping the hero of the hour.

Anybody who thought China would emerge from the pandemic with humility was sorely disappointed. With Western democracies distracted and stumbling in their response to the virus, the Party went on the offensive, claiming its resolute action had bought the world time. It used a multitude of fake Twitter and Facebook accounts to spread disinformation worldwide about the origin of the virus and to highlight the missteps of others actual and invented. For a regime that bans most Western social media in its own country, the Party and associated organisations have become prolific users to spread disinformation internationally.

It threatened and insulted countries which called for an independent international investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. Australia, which led those calls, was hit by an economic boycott and sweeping cyberattacks. Personal protective equipment, of which there was a dire shortage worldwide, was leveraged as a propaganda tool. China is the worlds biggest producer, and shipments were accompanied by demands for public displays of gratitude from desperate recipients, usually in front of the assembled cameras of Chinese state media.