BEIJING (AP) — The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks.
By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.
Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state — a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison.
Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.
“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said, sitting behind black curtains that block him from the glare of police lights trained straight at his house. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”
Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.
U.S. companies did this by bringing “predictive policing” to China — technology that sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their behavior. But they also allow Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.
Across China, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.
The AP investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company; tens of thousands of pages of confidential corporate and government documents; public Chinese language marketing material; and thousands of procurements, many provided by ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the non-profit Asia Society. The AP also drew from dozens of open record requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former Chinese and American engineers, executives, experts, officials, administrators, and police officers.
American technology made up nearly every part of China’s surveillance apparatus, AP found:
“Everything was built on American tech,” said Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations who studied the use of U.S. tech by Chinese police. “China’s capability was close to zero.”
IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies. Seagate and Western Digital said they adhere to all relevant laws and regulations where they operate.
Some U.S. companies ended contracts in China over rights concerns and after sanctions. For example, IBM said it has prohibited sales to Tibet and Xinjiang police since 2015, and suspended business relations with defense contractor Huadi in 2019.
However, sanctions experts noted that the laws have significant loopholes and often lag behind new developments. For example, a ban on military and policing gear to China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre does not take into account newer technologies or general-use products that can be applied in policing.
They also noted that the law around export controls is complicated. Raj Bhala, an expert in international trade law at the University of Kansas, said the issues the AP described fell into “the kind of gray area that we put in exams.”
“It would raise concerns about possible inconsistencies, possible violations,” said Bhala, who emphasized he was speaking generally and not about any specific company. “But I really stress ‘possible.’ We need to know more facts.”
While German, Japanese and Korean firms also played a role, American tech firms were by far the biggest suppliers.
The Xinjiang government said in a statement that it uses surveillance technologies to “prevent and combat terrorist and criminal activity,” that it respects citizens’ privacy and legal rights and that it does not target any particular ethnicity. The statement said Western countries also use such technology, calling the U.S. “a true surveillance state.” Other government agencies did not respond to a request for comment, including China’s police and authorities in the Yangs’ province.
“Because of this technology … we have no freedom at all,” said Yang Guoliang’s elder daughter, Yang Caiying, now in exile in Japan. “At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”
Back when China was emerging from the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, three in four Chinese were farmers, including the Yangs. They lived in a three-room home of tiles and pounded earth nestled among the lush, humid fields of the Yangtze River delta.
In 2001, the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks turbocharged interest in surveillance technology. One researcher claimed authorities could have foiled the attack by unearthing connections between hijackers through public information in databases.
American companies cashed in, selling the U.S. billions of dollars in surveillance technologies they said could prevent crime and terror attacks.
“China didn’t have this kind of thing before,” said Wang, a former Chinese police official in Xinjiang who asked to be identified only by last name for fear of retaliation. “These concepts all came from the West.”
Soon, disturbing stories emerged. Chinese police blocked sensitive news, pinpointing dissidents with unnerving precision. They stalked adherents of the Falun Gong sect banned by authorities. Congress demanded explanations from tech companies.
At a human rights conference in February, then-Cisco lawyer Katie Shay said companies had a responsibility to understand how customers might misuse their technology for “surveillance and censorship.”
“A lot of people have suffered at the hands of their government, and I want to acknowledge that pain,” said Shay, who left Cisco in June. “I also will say that Cisco disputes the allegations of Cisco’s involvement.”
Cisco told the AP it is committed to human rights, but the court allegations may “open the floodgates for suits against U.S. corporations merely for legal exports of off-the-shelf goods and services.”
As Cisco was summoned before Congress, IBM partnered with a Chinese defense contractor on Phase Two of China’s “Golden Shield.”
“Consolidate Communist Party rule,” read the Huadi blueprint, which showed the databases would track hundreds of thousands of people online.
In response to AP’s questions, IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”:
“ … If older systems are being abused today — and IBM has no knowledge that they are — the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today.”
Back in 2009, Beijing needed the technology urgently to quash critics bonding online. Among them were the Yangs.
In April that year, local authorities ordered the Yangs and more than 300 other families in their village off their land. Developers coveted their prime lakefront property for “Western-style” apartments and villas, with fountains, football fields and shopping centers.
The Yangs had no idea police were installing systems that could target families like theirs. They just knew their land was being seized — in return for just a unit in a five-floor walk-up, too many stairs for their elderly mother to climb.
The Yangs and other farmers across China filed complaints.
“I discovered the way the government took our land was illegal,” Yang Caiying said. “They cheated us.”
Once again, American firms pitched their technology as the solution.
The government sent troops and cut Xinjiang’s phone and internet connections. In secret meetings, officials concluded that police had failed to spot the danger signs because they couldn’t identify Uyghurs deemed separatists, terrorists, and religious extremists, three engineers then working for the Xinjiang government told AP.
At the time, Xinjiang police and data systems were already running on American technology including IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft, the engineers said, which AP verified by reviewing government contracts. But the databases were unconnected.
So Xinjiang launched an ambitious initiative to fuse data from all available sources, including banks, railways, and phone companies, into a central database. Officials demanded complete information on all suspicious individuals and their relatives going back three generations, according to the engineers, who described specific meetings in which they participated. Two asked to remain anonymous, fearing for their family in China; the third, Nureli Abliz, is now in Germany.
Soon, lucrative contracts went up for bidding. Among those seeking to profit was IBM.
“Prevent problems before they happen,” IBM promised Chinese officials. In an August 2009 pamphlet, IBM cited the Xinjiang riots and said its technology could help the government “ensure urban safety and stability.”
Chinese police purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of products from companies like IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft to upgrade the “Golden Shield” policing systems, a leaked accounting ledger acquired by AP from a whistleblower shows.
In the confrontation between the Chinese state and its critics, American technology tipped the scales of power.
In 2011, thieves ransacked the Yangs’ house, hunting for their property deed. They didn’t find it.
Two years later, bald men with tattoos and gold chains smashed down their door, shattered windows and flipped furniture to bully them out of their home anyway. Yang’s mother dropped to the floor in terror. Doctors diagnosed a heart attack, but the Yangs didn’t have money for a pacemaker.
Furious, the Yangs sued local police. In June 2015, a judge ruled their land had been seized illegally. The Yangs celebrated.
Overnight, China’s budding rights-defense movement was dealt a fatal blow — and with it, the Yangs’ case. The Yangs were called in and curtly told the judgment was being overturned, their lawsuit dismissed without trial.
“We really had too much faith in the law, you know?” Yang Guoliang said, his hands clenched in fists. “It turned out to be worthless.”
When bombs tore through a train station in Xinjiang’s capital hours after a visit by leader Xi Jinping in 2014, Xi demanded a crackdown.
“He was super angry,” said Abliz, one of the engineers with the Xinjiang government. “They concluded they weren’t surveilling Uyghurs closely enough.”
The next year, in April 2015, Abliz attended a closed-door exposition in Xinjiang. A booth ran by Landasoft, the former IBM partner, caught his eye.
After years as a vendor of IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to Xinjiang police, Landasoft had struck out on its own, touting i2-like software it said could detain extremists before they caused trouble. The similarity was no coincidence: Landasoft’s software was copied from i2, according to leaked emails and records.
“The platform is developed based on i2,” a Landasoft project manager wrote in an email.
It used a proprietary data visualization system developed by i2. The software powered what was called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, with the authority to trigger arrests.
Abliz went numb.
“I thought then that this was the end of humanity,” he said.
Landasoft did not respond to repeated requests for comment. IBM said it cut ties with Landasoft in 2014 and was not aware of any interaction between Landasoft and the Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang.
Though Chinese hardware was favored, foreign software was irreplaceable for its performance and compatibility with China’s American-built systems, engineers told AP. That included server and database software from Oracle and Microsoft and cloud software from VMWare, which Dell acquired in 2016.
In late 2016, the crackdown began. Internal documents, a leaked copy of the Landasoft software and interviews with 16 former Xinjiang police officers, officials and engineers reveal how the system worked.
“They thought it better to grab thousands of innocents than let a single criminal slip free,” Abliz said.
The technology was crude and flawed. Landasoft emails show engineers frantically fixing a software bug to release hundreds of people categorized as high-risk. And surveillance cameras often misidentified people, a former Xinjiang police officer found when he checked their ID cards.
Yet officers were told “computers cannot lie” and that the IJOP’s listed targets were “absolutely correct,” Abliz said. The software’s orders were often obeyed fearfully, unquestioningly.
“The tech companies told the government their software is perfect,” Abliz said. “It’s all a myth.”
The all-encompassing surveillance forced total compliance: Officers arrested colleagues, neighbors informed on each other.
In May 2017, Kalbinur Sidik, a teacher now in the Netherlands, was summoned to her district government office in a yellow brick apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital. A young Uyghur woman, fresh from college, rose and introduced herself as a local official. Sidik, the woman explained, was being appointed as the head of her building, responsible for collecting information on neighbors.
“What’s this data going to be used for?” Sidik asked.
The woman looked at a computer, with a Landasoft program running and lists of names and tags: “Goes out at night,” “Overseas phone,” “unemployed.” One button stood out: “Push Alert.”
The woman clicked it, and the screen filled with names. These people, the woman explained, would be detained and interrogated for suspected ties to terrorism. Sidik’s eyes widened.
“I hated her for what she was doing,” Sidik said. “I knew those people would disappear.”
Xinjiang officials issued arrest quotas, Sidik and five other former officers and administrators said. Sidik watched with horror as the number of people who attended her compound’s weekly mandatory flag-raising ceremony shrank, from 400 to just over 100, as residents were arrested.
Sidik asked her neighborhood official where it all came from.
“We’ve spent a lot of money to import foreign technology,” she recalls the official telling her.
Among those caught in the digital dragnet was Parida Qabylqai, an ethnic Kazakh pharmacist at a military hospital in Xinjiang.
In February 2018, Qabylqai was flagged by the IJOP for visiting her parents in Kazakhstan. At first, her boss thought it was a mistake.
“You’re a good person, you shouldn’t be listed,” she recalled him saying. Then he checked the IJOP and spotted her name.
“It’s really serious! You’re going to end up in the camps,” he blurted out in shock.
An officer pressed a confession into her hands.
“What did I do wrong?” Qabylqai asked.
“Just sign!” the officer shouted.
“They did things to us that no human being should ever have to experience,” she said. “But they said my name was listed by the IJOP, so they didn’t need to explain anything.”
Even enforcers of the system weren’t spared.
In 2018, Liu Yuliang, a civil servant in Xinjiang, was ordered to the home of a young police officer in his village. He and dozens of others stood, silent, as the officer embraced his sobbing, pregnant wife.
The officer had forced many people into the camps. Then he himself was flagged for detention.
Too fearful to resist, Liu went along with the arrest, just as the young officer had done before him.
As police swept Xinjiang, Landasoft purchased software from Pivotal, a cloud company later acquired by Broadcom, emails show. And Landasoft registered accounts on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in 2018, seeking to expand cloud offerings to police clients, emails show.
AWS said Landasoft “consumed very limited cloud services for a brief period” and not for software in the Xinjiang crackdown. Microsoft said Landasoft used Azure services through a self-service portal retired in 2021, and that any Landasoft data was deleted.
The Xinjiang government told the AP: “There is absolutely no such thing as ‘large-scale human rights violations.’”
Liu eventually resigned and returned to his hometown in eastern China, trying to forget what he had seen and done. But he noted with unease the new cameras and checkpoints being installed around his home.
Four days later, state security called and summoned him for questioning. The all-seeing surveillance apparatus had followed him home.
“The Xinjiang model is being copied everywhere, in every city in China,” Liu said.
In 2024, Liu left China, ignoring an airport officer who warned that wherever he went, he would be watched.
“This technology has no emotions,” Liu said. “But in the hands of a government that doesn’t respect the law, it becomes a tool for evil.”
But the harder the Yangs push, the harder the system pushes back.
In February 2023, they went to the National Public Complaints Administration in Beijing with a letter. Two days later, police grabbed them from their hotel and drove them home.
The Yangs persisted, trying to plead their case to Beijing. In the following months, they were seized at bus and train stations, beaten at a hospital and abducted by ambulance.
Last July, Yang’s mother tried again. She carried a letter for Chinese leader Xi Jinping:
“They’re using violence and kidnapping to bar me from petitioning and seeking medical treatment … We beg you, General Secretary, to save us.”
Outside Beijing’s leadership compound, burly men in black tackled Yang’s mother to the ground. She was jailed for over a month, questioned, strip-searched, force-fed medication and deprived of food and water. In October, she and Yang’s sister disappeared.
The Yangs’ house is now the last left standing. The father lives alone.
His relatives have cut contact, unnerved by the flock of police that tail him. Thousands of pages of documents stashed in drawers, stuffed in bags, and piled in boxes in a bathtub chronicle every step of their 16-year quest for justice.
In April, Yang was sent criminal charges showing how much police had spent to stop the family’s “abnormal petitioning.”
The cost: About $37,000.
