This week, the Chinese government activated its vast censorship apparatus to prevent dissemination of news regarding thousands of citizens taking to the streets to protest the CCP’s zero-COVID lockdowns. China has developed the world’s most sophisticated and invasive surveillance scheme: According to The Wall Street Journal, police have been dispersing to the site of protests ahead of time thanks to their monitoring of internet traffic, cellphone data and messaging apps. China also has access to data from hundreds of millions of cameras, “some equipped with facial-recognition software… The government has enhanced these capabilities over the past two years as part of contact-tracing efforts to control the spread of the virus.”
Such compulsion becomes necessary when a tyrannical government presides over an increasingly unhappy population. Chinese dictator Xi Jinping despises capitalism — in fact, he despises it so much that he has undercut the durability of his own economy in a bizarre quest to pursue a form of authoritarian mercantilism. The result has been slower economic growth, shoddy product innovation and extraordinary levels of debt, all piled atop an aging demographic time bomb. He has sought to make up for this through higher levels of compulsion domestically, combined with stealing technology from the West and utilizing military power to simply take over areas like Hong Kong. Chinese tech companies have been brought to heel: as The New York Times reported in July 2021, Chinese “companies and entrepreneurs are effectively telling the government that they know who the master is.”
But Xi hasn’t stopped there.
Xi has taken advantage of the weak underbelly of capitalism — the reality that profit-seeking enterprises will allow themselves to be co-opted by malevolent actors in order to maintain their profitability, that corporations are not predominantly concerned with American national security but with economic efficiency. This is why Apple is now reportedly doing the bidding of the Chinese government.