On WeChat last weekend, "Fatty Zhao, scholar of Song Dynasty history" reflected on a recent fire at a Shandong university. The students’ escape route was blocked by facial recognition turnstiles through which...
A predictive policing tool described as a “Crowd Mood Monitoring and Early Warning System,” on display at the recent Zhuhai Air Show in Guangdong province, has attracted considerable backlash online. After photos and...
The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) boasting that WeChat automatically records user activity and shares it with law enforcement. The short video skit...
Around 5:00 p.m. local time on Friday, an explosion damaged an office building of the Chinese consulate in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar. No casualties were reported, but the Chinese government condemned the...
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Commerce proposed rules to ban Chinese technology from internet-connected vehicles in the U.S. The plan was unveiled by the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security after a seven-month...
The political atmosphere in Venezuela remains fraught in the weeks after its presidential election. While President Nicolás Maduro’s loyalist-packed supreme court backed his claim of victory on Thursday, the opposition produced...
Chinese internet regulators are purportedly considering new methods to safeguard users’ personal information online. Their solution, however, involves giving the government greater control over user data. The proposal has...
Government surveillance is a ubiquitous and growing phenomenon in China. New documents issued by the Ministry of State Security last month will empower Chinese law enforcement to search electronic devices without either a...
Two Chinese manufacturers of video surveillance equipment—state-owned Hikvision and publicly traded company Dahua Technology—have joined the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) in an attempt to burnish their reputations, which...
On April 6, a Weibo user from Zhejiang province reported a case of local anti-fraud center overreach that resulted in his bank cards and Alipay account being frozen after he made a work-related call to a Singaporean bank. In a...
Last week, the bodies of eight Chinese nationals were discovered off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, after their boat capsized along a route often used by migrants attempting to reach the U.S. This is the latest example of an...
As part of a larger interview series about Tibet, CDT recently published two interviews specifically about digital surveillance in Tibet: “Lhadon Tethong on Tibetans’ ‘Spirit of Resistance and Desire for Freedom,’” and “Tenzin...
As the one-year anniversary of the lifting of China’s “zero-COVID” policy approaches, residents in many provinces in China have been dismayed and alarmed by the apparent return of mobile phone app-based health codes. Screenshots...
In a recent essay, Lu Dewen (吕德文, Lǚ Déwén)—a sometimes controversial Wuhan University sociologist whose research focuses on rural governance—argues that bureaucratic formalism, meaningless busywork, and technological hegemony...
The Chinese government’s position on the Israel-Hamas war has evolved from non-committal to “anti-Western neutrality,” designed to vilify the U.S. and win over Arabic publics. The result of this position is reflected in...
The full report can be read in PDF form here. Below is a brief introduction. A CDT investigation details the efforts of police and other departments across China to utilize geographic information systems (GIS) to enhance and...
A master list of “violent and terrorist” multimedia files Xinjiang police use to flag Uyghurs and other Muslims for interrogation includes common Islamic religious content including Quran verses, according to a new Human Rights...
In a remarkable violation of Party discipline, an organization partially under the auspices of the Beijing Communist Youth League’s house organ posted a requiem for the 2022 “White Paper Movement” to WeChat. The name was...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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