Naomi Klein, duly lauded for The Shock Doctrine, has an article in Rolling Stone about China, the Olympics, and the new police state. It's fairly long, so I'm going to excerpt a paragraph or two and strongly encourage you to read the whole thing.
Klein's thesis is that China is using the 2008 Olympics to roll out its new version of the police state:
Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port — to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis.
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China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.
Klein goes on to detail the massive surveillance system, called Golden Shield, that the Chinese are building. When complete, every single person in China will have their photo stored in a setup that links high-resolution surveillance cameras with top-line facial recognition software.
The not-so-secret secret of Golden Shield is that it's being built with U.S. investment and technology - quite possibly in violation of U.S. law, which barred U.S. companies from selling China any "crime control or detection instruments or equipment" after Tiananmen Square. But as we've seen repeatedly in recent years, the law is a flimsy barrier when there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.
China is already using its high-tech surveillance system to manipulate news coverage (as it did during the Tibetan protests) and crack down on political dissent across China, designating so-called "safe cities" where surveillance cameras link directly to local police stations - and are designed to alert the watchers to potential problems such as large concentrations of people in one place. Political unrest has been increasing sharply in China - but the new system is being used to shut down dissidents before they can organize.
Klein interviews Stephen Herrington, a former lieutenant colonel in U.S. military intelligence, who is chilled at what he sees happening:
"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy."
Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."
One more reason to be thankful that Bush has only a few months left in office. But this cooperation between the U.S. and China will not end with his departure. Nor will the trend toward increasingly intensive surveillance - and its potential for repressive misuse.