Most Deep Learning papers related to tracking human pose, identifying abnormal behavior, detecting crime from video feeds etc. have Chinese authors. Literally bleeding-edge stuff used to subdue people. Can't wait to see some western politicians to hop on the same train once this tech is cheap after China beta-tests it and irons out all the quirks.
Subdue? Not sure of that. But this is ironic on a number of levels. First, China's crackdown on Xinjiang followed a prolonged (multi-decade) period of low intensity guerilla resistance to their occupation that essentially garnered no international reporting. Second, everywhere else in China has suffered deep and substantial cultural losses in the rush through socialism to modernity as well, with religion, festivals and local languages and dialects front and center. Third, China only really stepped up its efforts in Xinjiang right after the US made "terrorism/national security" the catch-all political excuse de riguer in the noughties, post 911. Fourth, the Islamic presence in Xinjiang literally corresponds to a complete cultural genocide against a range of multicultural (but predominantly Buddhist) kingdoms so effective that we are still piecing together how to read their (significant) literature today. Fifth, a $290M CCTV contract is nothing versus daily US military-industrial spending. Sixth, modern China's main push against peoples in this region began as early as the 1940s based on a joint China-Russia opposition to nomadic tribes in the region, documented in the book <i>Kazak Exodus</i>. <a href="http://pratyeka.org/books/kazak-exodus/" rel="nofollow">http://pratyeka.org/books/kazak-exodus/</a>
Why is this topic so popular on HN? I'm just curious because there are so many social problems and actual politics news in the world but somehow this is always up here.
> “The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in Xinjiang,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China<p>Sounds ironic. Xinjiang is now the only province in China to register a recession after eighties
This apparatus of surveillance is functionally identical to what has been commercially deployed in the U.S., except that we are considerably ahead of China in areas like in-car monitoring and always-on home microphones.
It's not just for home use. China is also exporting their surveillance and social credit technology to Venezuela, Cuba, NK, and even Australia. Those white crowd control vehicles used by Maduro forces to run over dozens of protestors a few weeks ago? Another tailor-made export.<p><a href="https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/chinas-new-social-credit-system-turns-orwells-1984-into-reality/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/chinas-new-social-credit-syste...</a>
journalist's thread:<p>>Three years ago China’s leading maker of military electronics, CETC, came to Xinjiang with a vision: bring the tech of battlefield management to control and surveil all aspects of the lives of Uighurs. This is our attempt to walk through how it works.<p>…<p>>That shows how important the power of the Chinese state is in creating such a totalizing surveillance system. But it also shows how powerful readily available commercial technology has become and how easily it can be made into the basic ingredients of a police state.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1131360852429266945" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1131360852429266945</a>
There is nothing in this article that the U.S. hasn't been doing via technology exported out of the Acela corridor _forever_. Both are bad, but it will likely take China another 50 years to match what our MIC has done. Just this morning I was reading about how the notorious Azov Battalion of Ukraine (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion</a>) got much of its military training and weapons from the U.S. amongst others.