A few years ago, I interviewed one of thousands of startups in Shenzhen, China’s southern tech hub. The company is an AI chip maker for visual recognition and big data analysis used in public security and social governance. The product is in demand, assured by the company’s biggest client whose needs only grow over time. That client is the nation’s public security bureau – the police.

“Our biggest client is the public security bureau,” the company spokesman said, “at least two-thirds of the country’s provincial police use our chip.”

Surveillance is an age-old practice in China. Throughout recent history, the Chinese Communist Party has watched its people closely. As a foreign correspondent previously based in China, I experienced Big Brother’s watchfulness for a number of years – phones were tapped and minders were never too far away and sometimes, these people appear in one’s physical orbit. The surveillance tactics were analogue and generally harmless, it was just the way things were under the system. It was also a different regime, under a different leadership.

But technology has advanced the art of Chinese surveillance to cover more scope and ground, and faster. It has hugely bolstered the Party’s control mechanism domestically, as well as expanded its influence and political manipulation as a rising power abroad.

Within China, Skynet, the national network of monitoring system of cameras, the internet and apps, including the ones allowing individuals to report on each other – to keep a lid on the people’s movement. Traffic lights are installed with cameras that capture and record the action live – you can see yourself on a monitor below the lights – as you cross the road. Industry research firm IHS Markit estimated that by the end of 2021, there would have been about 1 billion surveillance cameras in the world where 540 million of them in China.

The boon and bane of technological advancement is profoundly felt in today’s society.

“We live in a high-pressure cooker,” a highly successful Shanghai entrepreneur said. “We dislike the scrutiny but the technology has brought so much convenience into our lives that we are completely sucked in.”

The mass surveillance is closely connected to the Social Credit System, a set of databases managed by the national economic planner, the central bank and the court system to assess the trustworthiness of individuals, companies and government entities.

Failing to retain a certain level of social credibility may result in punitive measures imposed, including banning one’s mobility, access to the best schools, well-paid jobs and high-speed Internet subscription, as well as being publicly shamed as a bad citizen.

China’s economic rise has also changed its political posturing to the rest of the world, with an increased aggression to reshape the international order that it views as having deferred its interests. Chinese tech companies – many of which are affiliated to the government – supplied AI surveillance technology to most of the world in 2019 according to a report by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

More recently, researchers at Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto group that studies global cybersecurity found that the COVID-19 contact tracing app MY2022 mandated for athletes, the press and spectators attending the Winter Olympics last month identified flaws in data transmission. For instance, hackers can intercept data being sent from the app to servers or sensitive information containing metadata is transmitted without encryption, making personal information like medical history, travel and passport details vulnerable. The app also contained a censored keyword list that can filter politically sensitive topics, according to Citizen Lab.

Chinese tech companies are often marred by allegations of privacy and infringement breaches. One of its largest Huawei Technologies is alleged to have the ability to retrieve sensitive information from the data that flows through the wireless networks and systems it built and sold around the world, which it has vehemently denied.

Meanwhile the AI surveillance chip maker in Shenzhen, responsible for most of the Chinese police’s surveillance platform, says it is accelerating its expansion globally.