China harvesting data on global scale, Australian report warns

An Australian think tank has warned that a global data mining exercise by a Chinese company in partnership with overseas tech firms and universities could be used by Beijing to shape international discourse, promote its social credit system and support China’s military intelligence.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) released a report on Monday by its Chinese security and politics analyst Samantha Hoffman, which said China had established a “massive and global data collection ecosystem” which could be used to reshape global governance.

Hoffman’s report, “Engineering global consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s data-driven power expansion”, examines the operations and international relationships of Beijing-based translation services company Global Tone Communication Technology (GTCOM).

Hoffman claims GTCOM – a subsidiary of the state-owned China Publishing Group, run under the party’s central propaganda department – allowed Beijing access to a technological toolkit – including bulk data collection, artificial intelligence data processing, and facial and voice recognition – to identify and manage state security risks and assist government decision-making.

She also found the company had a cooperative agreement with Chinese firm Haiyun Data, which provides data visualisation platforms for China’s public security bureaus – including in the far western region of Xinjiang, where human rights activists and researchers estimate that 1.5 million Uygur Muslims and other ethnic minorities are detained in mass internment camps.

“The Chinese Communist Party has a much more ambitious vision for harnessing a broad suite of current and emerging technologies in support of its own interests, including devices that might be seen as relatively benign, such as language translation technologies,” Hoffman said.