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Still, while the speed and intent of this response to protect workers in the absence of an effective US intervention at the national level is admirable, these Chinese companies are also linked to horrific human rights abuses.

Dahua is one of the largest providers of “smart camp” systems that Vera Zhou has experienced in Xinjiang (the company says its facilities are powered by technologies such as “computer vision systems, big data analytics and cloud computing”). In October 2019, both Dahua and Megvii were among eight Chinese tech firms on a list that barred US citizens from selling goods and services to them (the list aimed at preventing US firms from supplying non-US firms, national interests, Amazon’s sale to Dahua) blocks, but does not buy from them). BGI’s subsidiaries in Xinjiang placed on US trade ban list July 2020.

Amazon’s purchase of Dahua heat-mapping cameras recalls an earlier moment in the spread of global capitalism, captured by historian Jason Moore’s memorable phrase return: “Behind Manchester is Mississippi.”

What did Moore mean by that? In Friedrich Engels’ rereading of his analysis of the textile industry that made Manchester, England so profitable, he saw that many aspects of the British Industrial Revolution would not have been possible without the cheap cotton produced by slave labor in the United States. Similarly, Seattle, Kansas City, and Seoul’s ability to respond as quickly to the pandemic is due in part to printing systems in Northwest China opening up a space to train biometric surveillance algorithms.

Protecting workers during the pandemic depends on forgetting college students like Vera Zhou. This means ignoring the dehumanization of thousands of prisoners and unfree workers.

Also in Seattle before Xinjiang.

Amazon has its own role in involuntary surveillance that disproportionately harms ethno-racial minorities, given its partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting undocumented immigrants, and active lobbying efforts to support weak biometric surveillance regulation. More directly, Microsoft Research Asia, dubbed the “cradle of Chinese artificial intelligence”, has played an instrumental role in the growth and development of both Dahua and Megvii.

Chinese government funding, global terrorism rhetoric, and US industry education are three of the main reasons a fleet of Chinese companies is now ruling the world in face and voice recognition. This process was accelerated by the war on terror, which focused on embedding Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Huis in a complex digital and material framework, but is now spreading to the Chinese tech industry, where data-intensive infrastructure systems are producing flexible digital enclosures across the country. although not on the same scale as in Xinjiang.

China’s broad and rapid response to the pandemic has further accelerated this process by rapidly implementing and making clear these systems. they work. Because they extend state power in such comprehensive and intimate ways, they can effectively change human behavior.

Alternative approaches

But China’s approach to the pandemic isn’t the only way to stop it. Democratic states such as New Zealand and Canada, which provide tests, masks and economic aid to those forced to stay at home, have also been effective. These nations make it clear that even at the national level, involuntary surveillance is not the only way to protect the well-being of the majority.

In fact, numerous studies have shown that surveillance systems promote systemic racism and dehumanization by making targeted populations detainable. While it is important that past and present US administrations use Entity List to stop sales to companies like Dahua and Megvii, it also creates a double standard, penalizing Chinese firms for automating racialization while funding American companies to do similar things.

An increasing number of US-based companies are trying to develop their own algorithms for detecting racial phenotypes, albeit with a consensual consumer approach. Companies like Revlon are making automatic segregation a form of convenience for marketing things like lipstick, solidifying the technical scenarios individuals can use.

As a result, in many ways race remains an unconsidered part of human interaction with the world. Police in the United States and China consider automated assessment technologies to be the tools they have for detecting potential criminals or terrorists. Algorithms show that it is normal for Black men or Uyghurs to be detected disproportionately by these systems. They prevent the police and those they protect from recognizing that surveillance is always about controlling and disciplining people who don’t fit the vision of those in power. The world, not just China, has a surveillance problem.

To counter the increasing banality and everydayness of automatic racialization, the harms of biometric surveillance around the world must first be exposed. The lives of the detainees must be made visible at the limit of power over life. The role of engineers, investors, and public relations firms around the world must then be clarified in designing for human re-education, not thinking about human experience. Interconnection networks—the way Xinjiang stands behind and ahead of Seattle—must be made thinkable.

—This story is an edited excerpt from: In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony, Darren Byler (Columbia Global Reports, 2021.) Darren Byler is an assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University focusing on the technology and policy of urban life in China.