Naomi Klein has written a lengthy article appearing in Rolling Stone that I encourage everyone to have a look at, ‘China’s All-Seeing Eye: With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state.  It is ready for export '. 

Klein writes about the burgeoning capitalist-police state emerging in China, specifically in the ‘special economic zones ’ such as those in the city of Shenzhen , a city built to be an experiment in “free markets”.  Klein refers to this political-economic arrangement as ‘“market-Stalinism”… 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's central point of concern is the deployment of surveillance systems in Shenzhen,  which is set to launch 2 million CCTV cameras at the current population of the city, that would be one camera for every 6 citizens; but the city is growing as more and more people are displaced from China’s vast rural regions to the “special economic zones.”

This tendency to use police state systems of control both in the workplace and the public sphere is inspired, in no small part by the US’s ‘War on Terror’, which has already made the security industry a 200 billion dollar market.  Facial recognition software integrated with high-resolution surveillance cameras are components in building this panopticon of control. One of the players Klein writes about is L-1 Identity Solutions . ‘L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits.’ L-1 advertises ‘solutions’ for Corporations, Casinos, Healthcare, the US federal government, and Civil ID cards. They create technologies used in Iraq and Afghanistan to identity people through fingerprint, voice, iris and facial recognition software. 

That is, China is deploying technologies used in the “War on Terror” with the help of US corporations, to monitor and track their own citizenry. As it turns out, it seems to be hand in hand with one of the largest expansions of a market economy in history, China’s experiment with capitalism, with the help of US businesses.  ‘It is L-1’s deep integration with multiple US government agencies that makes it dealings with China so interesting: It isn’t just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it’s U.S. taxpayers’ writes Klein.

Indeed, we have been told that fee markets go hand in hand with free people , but it’s precisely where the security industry profits, its business is using the free market to make the people less free.  As Klein writes, ‘Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn’t an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It’s the goal of doing business in China.’

I highly recommend reading the entire article at Rolling Stone Magazine.

Greg Walton's paper, 'China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China' .