https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...81ce9c-538e-11ec-8927-c396fa861a71_story.html
China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.
China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.
The software primarily targets China's domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.
The documents, publicly accessible through domestic government bidding platforms, also show that agencies including state media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators are purchasing new or more sophisticated systems to gather data.
These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.
"They are now reorienting part of that effort outward, and I think that's frankly terrifying, looking at the sheer numbers and sheer scale that this has taken inside China," said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who has conducted extensive research on China's domestic public opinion network.
"It really shows that they now feel it's their responsibility to defend China overseas and fight the public opinion war overseas," she said.
The purchases range in size from small, automated programs to projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that are staffed 24 hours a day by teams including English speakers and foreign policy specialists.
The documents describe highly customizable programs that can collect real-time social media data from individual social media users. Some describe tracking broad trends on issues including U.S. elections.
The Post was not able to review data collected by the systems but spoke to four people based in Beijing who are directly involved in government public opinion analysis and described separate software systems that automatically collect and store Facebook and Twitter data in real time on domestic Chinese servers for analysis.
China's systems for analyzing domestic public opinion online are a powerful but largely unseen pillar of President Xi Jinping's program to modernize China's propaganda apparatus and maintain control over the Internet.
The vast data collection and monitoring efforts give officials insight into public opinion, a challenge in a country that does not hold public elections or permit independent media.
The services also provide increasingly technical surveillance for China's censorship apparatus. And most systems include alarm functions designed to alert officials and police to negative content in real time.
These operations are an important function of what Beijing calls "public opinion guidance work" — a policy of molding public sentiment in favor of the government through targeted propaganda and censorship.
The exact scope of China's government public opinion monitoring industry is unclear, but there have been some indications about its size in Chinese state media. In 2014, the state-backed newspaper China Daily said more than 2 million people were working as public opinion analysts. In 2018, the People's Daily, another official organ, said the government's online opinion analysis industry was worth "tens of billions of yuan," equivalent to billions of dollars, and was growing at a rate of 50 percent a year.
That surveillance network system is expanding to include foreign social media at a time when global perceptions of Beijing are at their lowest in recent history
"On the back of the Sino-US trade talks and the Hong Kong rioting incident, it's becoming clearer day by day that the public opinion news war is arduous and necessary," China Daily said in a July 2020 bidding document for a $300,000 "foreign personnel analysis platform."
The invitation to tender lays out specifications for a program that mines Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for data on "well known Western media journalists" and other "key personnel from political, business and media circles."
"We are competing with the US and Western media, the battle for the right to speak has begun," it said.
The software should run 24 hours a day, according to the specifications, and map the relationships between target personnel and uncover "factions" between personnel, measuring their "China tendencies" and building an alarm system that automatically flags "false statements and reports on China."
Two people who work as analysts in public opinion analysis units contracted by government agencies in Beijing told The Post that they receive automated alarms via SMS, email and on dedicated computer monitors when "sensitive" content was detected. Both of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to foreign media.
"Having responsibility for [the monitoring] is a lot of pressure," said one of the people. "If we do our work poorly, there are severe repercussions."
Highly sensitive viral trends online are reported to a 24-hour hotline maintained by the Cybersecurity Administration of China (CAC), the body that oversees the country's censorship apparatus, the person said of their unit.
The person added that most of the alarms were related to domestic social media but that foreign social media had also been included in the units' monitoring since the middle of 2019.
The person's account is supported by four bidding documents for unrelated systems that mention direct hotlines to the CAC.
"The international balance of power has been profoundly adjusted," said the request for tenders. "Through the collection of public Internet information we can keep a close eye on the international community, analyze sensitivities and hot spots, and maintain the stability of Chinese society."
In an April 2020 article, the chief analyst at the People's Daily Online Public Opinion Data Center, Liao Canliang, laid out the ultimate goal of public opinion analysis.
"The ultimate purpose of analysis and prediction is to guide and intervene in public opinion," Canliang wrote. "… Public data from social network users can be used to analyze the characteristics and preferences of users, and then guide them in a targeted manner."
In the article, Liao points to Cambridge Analytica's impact on the 2016 U.S. election as evidence of social media's ability to mold public opinion.
"The West uses big data to analyze, research and judge public opinion to influence political activities. ... As long as there is a correct grasp on the situation, public opinion can also be guided and interfered with," he wrote.
The increase in China's monitoring of foreign public opinion on social media coincides with efforts by Beijing to boost its influence on Twitter and other U.S. social media platforms.
In June 2020, Twitter suspended 23,000 accounts that it said were linked to the Chinese Communist Party and covertly spreading propaganda to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. This month, Twitter said it removed a further 2,048 accounts linked to Beijing and producing coordinated content undermining accusations of rights abuses in Xinjiang.
Experts say those accounts represent a small fraction of China's efforts to boost pro-Beijing messaging on foreign social media.
In 14 instances, the analysis systems included a feature requested by the police that would automatically flag "sensitive" content related to Uyghurs and other Chinese ethnic minorities. An additional 12 analysis systems included the police-requested capability of monitoring individual content authors over time.
"It must support information monitoring of overseas social media … and provide for targeted collection of designated sites and authors," said one invitation to tender released by the Fuzhou city police in October that lists coverage of Facebook and Twitter as a requirement.
The monitoring of social media abroad by local police throughout China could be used in investigating Chinese citizens locally and abroad, as well as in flagging trends that stir domestic dissent, experts say.
Experts say the increasingly advanced social media surveillance technology available to Chinese police could worsen the targeted harassment of Beijing's critics.
"The Chinese government is one of the worst offenders when it comes to targeting individuals outside of the country," said Adrian Shahbaz, the director for technology and democracy at the think tank Freedom House.
"It has an extreme chilling effect on how Chinese citizens outside of China are using social media tools, because they know that back home, their information is very easily monitored by Chinese authorities," he said.
The China Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.
A police bureau in southern China's Nanping city purchased a $42,000 system that "supports collection, discovery, and warning functions for ... Twitter and Facebook social media data according to different classifications and keyword groups, as well as overseas information lists," according to bidding documents released in July 2020.
Other procurements for public opinion services outline programs purchased by Chinese police and Xinjiang government bodies to track "sensitive" ethnic language content abroad. (China's mainly-Muslim Uyghurs are concentrated in Xinjiang.)
A $43,000 system purchased by police in central China's Shangnan county included a "foreign sensitive information" collection system that requested Uyghur and Tibetan staff translators, according to the contracts.
Military procurement documents — less detailed than other types — did not offer much detail on the purpose of the foreign data collection but alluded to vague categories of data including "key personnel."
One heavily redacted June 2020 contract issued by the People's Liberation Army described a system that would trawl foreign sites and categorize data on the basis of affiliation, geography and country.
Source Data Technology, the Shanghai-based company that won the contract, says on its website that it uses "advanced big data mining and artificial intelligence analysis technology" to cover more than 90 percent of social media in the United States, Europe and China's neighboring countries.
