The Communist Party has discovered a new magic weapon in big data and artificial intelligence – that much was evident from Party and state leader Xi Jinping’s New Year’s address to the Chinese people in 2018. As he does every year, Xi sat in front of a large wall of books; the observant viewer could make out Homer’s Odyssey and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on the shelves. And as they do every year, internet users subsequently took a magnifying glass to each book spine.
Many noticed that this year, Xi Jinping had brought The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital down within reach. Most significantly, though, for the first time two bestsellers on artificial intelligence had been given a prominent position on the shelves: Brett King’s Augmented was sitting next to The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos. Domingos researches AI at the University of Washington, and his book invites people to join him in the search for the algorithm to end all algorithms, an algorithm that will go on developing itself infinitely. ‘If it exists,’ Domingos writes, ‘the Master Algorithm can derive all knowledge in the world – past, present and future – from data. Inventing it would be one of the greatest advances in the history of science.’102 Of course, there is no guarantee that Xi has really read King and Domingos – unlike Marx.
In the USA, researchers and companies are following China’s plans with curiosity; some are sounding the alarm. ‘They will have caught up with us by 2025,’ prophesies Eric Schmidt, who is now the head of Google’s parent company Alphabet and has evidently studied the State Council document from Beijing. ‘And by 2030 they’ll dominate the industry.’ Now, one should not take at face value everything that comes out of the mouths of Chinese planners, but in the past the Chinese state has shown what it’s capable of when something has been identified as politically desirable. Take, for example, the rapid creation of the largest high-speed train network in the world. And the CCP has clearly fixed on artificial intelligence as the key to its own survival and the perfection of its rule.
In the field of technology, at least, China is disproving those sceptics who still think an authoritarian system is poison for any kind of innovation. ‘There’s this strange belief that you can’t build a mobile app if you don’t know the truth about what happened in Tiananmen Square,’ Kaiser Kuo once said. Kuo is an American China-watcher and heavy metal guitarist, who spent many years as the head of international PR for Baidu in Beijing. ‘Trouble is, it’s not true.’103 For a long time now, China has been much more than a paradise for fake Nikes and alleged Louis Vuitton handbags with Chanel logos stuck on them. It’s also much more than just the ‘world’s factory’: the country with the cheapest labour, assembling our TVs and smartphones, the country that makes just £6 out of every £750 iPhone we buy.
After the USA, China has long been number two in the world when it comes to spending on research and development, and according to the latest report by the American National Science Foundation, those positions will soon be reversed. Between 2000 and 2015, China increased its research and development spending by 18 per cent every year. Spending in the USA, by contrast, rose by an average of just four per cent a year in the same period.104 The report also says that since 2003, the number of scientific publications from China has quintupled. China’s researchers have now outpaced the USA with their supercomputers, measured both by the machines’ capability and the number of these computers that appear in the world’s top 500. In 2020, researchers in the harbour city of Tianjin are planning to bring the first exascale computer into service, which would be ten times as fast as today’s supercomputers. (The USA hopes its Aurora project will have reached this point by 2021, a year later.) China is also leading the way in research into quantum computing. And behind the Great Firewall – shielded by the censors not just from the free flow of information, but helpfully also from the competition – a hi-tech parallel universe has come into being. China is the world’s biggest market for e-commerce, and at least in terms of market value, Alibaba and Tencent have long since moved into the same league as Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook.
In the fields of electronic transactions and the development of smartphone finance apps, China is way ahead of the rest of the world. ‘You get the sense when you leave China these days that you are going backwards,’ the Financial Times observed. The economic opportunities and the technological leap forward are one thing. But just as enticing for the state is an unprecedented opportunity to look inside its citizens’ heads, and to monitor them in their beds, on the streets, on their shopping trips, and during the most intimate of conversations.
WeChat, for instance, is a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in the West. The app began as a messaging service; the Chinese WhatsApp. But for China’s mobile phone users, it very quickly also became the Chinese Facebook. Then the Chinese Uber and the Chinese Booking.com and the Chinese Deliveroo. On smartphones at least, WeChat has to all intents and purposes gobbled up the Chinese internet. You can use WeChat to talk to friends, book taxis and hotel rooms, order food, buy cinema tickets, book trains and flights, rent city bikes, choose a cable TV package, pay your water and electricity bills and parking tickets, and get fast credit. Most significantly of all, you can make cashless payments. And all the while, the state security services are looking over your shoulder.
Two apps, Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay, have split the market for cashless payments between them – and the Chinese love them. An entire population has switched to mobile payment in record time. Hardly anyone uses debit or credit cards any longer – and nobody carries cash. In 2017, the Chinese used their phones to make 17 billion US dollars’ worth of transactions. That year, over 60 per cent of all cashless transactions worldwide took place in China. I could pay with WeChat in the snack bar in my side-street, the greengrocer’s, the hairdresser, and use it to buy noodle soup for the equivalent of £1.30. Eventually, people started giving me funny looks when I reached into my trouser pocket for cash. In Beijing, even the beggars now use barcodes, which passers-by can scan using WeChat to make their small donation.
At a courthouse in the Haidan district of Beijing, you can use WeChat to submit files and pay fees. The identity of the person submitting is confirmed via facial recognition.105 And in December 2017 the state press announced pilot projects in 26 cities to test WeChat as a state-recognised, electronic social-security identification and ID card.106 It’s the dream of every lazy citizen. It’s also the dream of the surveillance state, which gets news of its citizens’ every move and every transaction delivered for free in real time.
Tencent cooperates very closely with the censors, police and state security. During a chat, you might suddenly realise that the conversation has stopped making sense: certain words are being automatically deleted by WeChat between sender and receiver, without either party being informed. In the city of Puyang, a construction supervisor called Chen Shouli spent five days in a cell after forwarding a joke on WeChat about a rumoured affair between a singer and a senior government official, captioned with ‘haha’. And Wang Jianfeng from Shandong went to prison for 22 months after calling Party leader Xi Jinping a baozi and a ‘Maoist thug’ on WeChat. A baozi is a large steamed bun, and has been one of the portly Xi’s nicknames for many years.
Globally, in 2017 one in three new ‘unicorns’ – start-ups with a market value of a billion US dollars or more – was born in China, especially in Shenzhen and Beijing. Some experts believe that China’s Huawei is ahead of Apple in the development of mobile AI chips. And, as we’ve seen, on 17 January 2018, a Chinese computer also managed to win against the Go master Ke Jie: Tencent’s Fine Art software gave Ke Jie a two-stone head start, and still beat him.
But China’s companies are still weak when it comes to foreign trade, and the country still trails behind the USA in terms of its talent pool and total investment in the hi-tech area. The Dutch academic publisher Elsevier and Nikkei in Japan publish a list of the institutions whose AI research is most frequently cited worldwide: two of the top three are now from China, with
three in the top ten. It pays to look beyond the numbers, though. According to Jeffrey Ding, researcher at the University of Oxford’s ‘Governance of AI’ programme, and author of a study on Chinese progress in AI107, the nation’s AI research is no longer lacking in quantity, but it may still lack originality.108 His verdict: ‘China […] still cannot match the leading countries in the most innovative research and the most talented researchers.’ Ding’s 2018 study presented an ‘AI potential index’ for the first time, to compare China’s AI capacities with those of the USA – and the USA still performed twice as well.
The USA might still have the lead when it comes to researching the principles of AI, counters Xie Yinan from Megvii, ‘but in its practical application, we’re already a long way ahead.’ He pauses, then: ‘The state doesn’t place so many limits on us here… The government is behind us.’ Judges in Hebei Province are already getting AI to help them prepare their verdicts, and according to the state press, courts and lawyers in Shanghai are using it to check the quality of evidence, and avoid ‘convicting innocent people’.109
The city of Hangzhou is using algorithms to predict traffic flow, and all over the country ‘smart city’ projects are being launched in cooperation with firms like Alibaba and Huawei. The CCP, meanwhile, is going even further. In the province of Sichuan, and within its Youth League, the Party is testing a ‘smart red cloud’ on itself: the Party press says the algorithm is designed to modernise the way it assesses and chooses its functionaries. The system tracks the behaviour and ‘human relationships’ of CCP cadres, in order to predict ‘their future ideas and future behaviour’. And according to the Clean Governance Centre at Peking University, big data is also set to become China’s ‘most powerful weapon in the fight against corruption’.
Some in the USA are seeing parallels with the space race against the Soviet Union, more than half a century ago. And many believe China has the advantage: for one thing, while China is focusing on clear strategic goals, the USA is foundering under the presidency of the ignorant, anti-science Donald Trump. (Trump presented his government’s AI strategy in February 2019, 19 months after Beijing’s leaders.) But most important is the sheer mass of data to which researchers and companies have access in this nation of billions, with little hindrance from laws or debates about privacy. If the oil of the future is data, as the Economist puts it, then China is the new Saudi Arabia.The camera manufacturer Sense-Time claims to have access, via government departments, to databases containing 500 million faces. Its competitor Yitu even claims it can compare 1.5 billion faces. That includes not only every Chinese citizen, but also every foreigner who has passed through China’s borders, and whose features are automatically saved to a central database from the snapshot taken by border officials. ‘No other country can compete’ with China’s advantages here, according to a paper produced by the Beijing technology investor Sinovation Ventures: ‘In China, people use their mobile phones to pay for goods 50 times more often than Americans. Food delivery volume in China is 10 times more than that of the United States. And shared bicycle usage is 300 times that of the US.’110
On this last point, it is worth knowing that the candy-coloured hire bikes you find everywhere in China send all their movement and payment data back to a central database. In 2018, the company Mobike announced that its eight million bikes provided 30 terabytes of data every day. The company not only knows when and where and how fast you are cycling; it also analyses who is cycling with whom. And it shares all that data with the government.
The more data is collected, the more fodder the self-teaching algorithms have to perfect themselves. Not all experts agree, though, that the sheer mass of data makes other factors, like the quality of the AI semiconductor technology or the number of AI experts, unimportant. According to the Oxford University study mentioned above, in 2017 there were 78,700 scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence in the USA, while in China it was 39,200. The study doesn’t rule out the possibility that, for the smarter AI algorithms of the future, access to a greater mass of existing data might be less important.
One advantage China definitely enjoys is the speed and the lack of restraint with which it can commit itself to developing this technology. ‘Artificial intelligence was invented in the West,’ says the MIT Technology Review, the magazine produced by the elite US university in Massachusetts, ‘but its future is currently taking shape on the other side of the world.’ In May 2018, SenseTime announced a partnership with MIT; SenseTime founder Tang Xiao’ou had taken his doctorate there in 1996. His company was only set up in 2014, and today it’s already worth more than seven billion US dollars. SenseTime has lured people from MIT, Microsoft and Google to work for it in Beijing. ‘We’re still a baby, compared to Facebook and Google,’ says the PR representative Yuan Wei, ‘but our aim is very clear: we want to become world leaders.’ The company’s Chinese name is Shang Tang, after the first Chinese dynasty, Shang (18th to 11th century BC) and its first emperor, Tang. ‘That was a time when China led the world,’ Tang Xiao’ou once said, explaining the choice of name, ‘and it will again, with its technological innovations.’
The Party foresees a wide range of uses for AI. Whether in education, public health or infrastructure, the aim is for new technologies to solve problems and increase productivity. At the same time, it wants to use artificial intelligence to provide central planners with a feedback and steering mechanism, with which it can predict and prevent any potential economic and social crises that might threaten the system. ‘The widespread use of AI in education, medical care, pensions, environmental protection, urban operations, judicial services, and other fields will greatly improve the level of precision in public services, comprehensively enhancing the people’s quality of life,’ says the first part of the state AI plan.111 It continues: ‘AI technologies can accurately sense, forecast, and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner; […] which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.’ AI promises to make the dream of all authoritarian rulers come true: control and surveillance of the entire population.
It is facial recognition that has been making the most headlines recently. Universities are using it to check student attendance, and dispensers in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven are using it to ensure the thrifty use of toilet paper: the machine releases 60cm of paper per face. Anyone who requires more has to wait nine minutes before another 60cm are granted. The Shenzhen police advertised the fact that they had solved a case of child abduction within 15 hours thanks to facial-recognition cameras. In the same city, the metro trains have cameras installed in every carriage, which can monitor ‘every inch of the train in ultra-high definition,’ as the South China Morning Post reported. ‘Not only can passengers’ every move be closely watched, but their most subtle facial expressions are being captured and transmitted in the form of ultra-clear images, without any delay whatsoever.’112
The transport police in Shanghai are using intelligent cameras to catch people driving without a licence; registry office clerks in Chongqing are exposing people who commit marriage fraud; and the police in Jinan and Shenzhen are publicly shaming people who cross the street when the lights are red. Their faces appear in real time on a video screen at the side of the road – together with their name, address and ID number. At a single crossing in the district of Fujian, the cameras caught no fewer than 13,930 people in the space of ten months. Very soon, rule-breakers will start receiving automatic texts to their mobile phones, telling them off and warning them that next time, they are liable to be punished.
Middle School No.11 in Hangzhou drew enthusiastic attention from the press in 2018 when it had ‘eyes in the sky’ installed in every classroom: surveillance cameras with a continuous view of every student.113 ‘They are all-knowing eyes; nothing gets past th
em. As soon as someone nods off or starts daydreaming, he is captured on the spot, using facial recognition,’ said an article on Sina.com. According to the article, the cameras not only capture how often during the eight-hour school day a student’s mind wanders; they also they also ‘analyse facial expression and mood – whether someone is happy, sad, annoyed or reluctant – and send the data straight to a terminal that analyses the student’s attitude to learning. The system really does have magic powers.’ The school has long since done away with the school card that students used to use for the canteen or the library. ‘Students scan their faces to get food, they scan their faces to buy things, and they scan their faces to borrow books.’ Big data and facial recognition, according to the report, are helping ‘students to study more efficiently.’ A student named Xiao Qian admits that he used to be a bit lazy in the lessons he didn’t enjoy as much: ‘You might close your eyes for a minute or read another school book under the desk.’ With the eyes in the sky, those days are gone: ‘Now you feel the gaze of a pair of mysterious eyes on you constantly, and no one dares to go off-task any longer.’
Years ago, China’s police force christened its nationwide network of cameras ‘Skynet’ – quite probably without any hint of irony or reference to the Terminator films, where Skynet is a rogue AI organism on a mission to wipe out the human race. It isn’t all that long since the Party press was reporting that the state’s aim was to be able to identify the face of every Chinese citizen within three minutes. In March 2018, a tweet from the People’s Daily claimed that now, the Skynet was ‘capable of identifying any one of China’s 1.4 billion citizens within a second,’ and was thus helping ‘the police in prosecuting crimes.’ Masks, hats, sunglasses, even plastic surgery present no problem these days, claim Megvii and SenseTime. ‘Machines aren’t as easy to fool as people are.’
We Have Been Harmonised Page 17