China’s censorship and surveillance were already intense. AI is turbocharging those systems

Surveillance cameras are seen on a post near the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, China, on November 5, 2024. Wang Gang/FeatureChina/AP

China’s ruling Communist Party is using artificial intelligence to turbocharge the surveillance and control of its 1.4 billion citizens, with the technology reaching further into daily life, predicting public demonstrations and monitoring the moods of prison inmates, according to a new report .

Many of these systems are already well-documented – from the country’s army of online censors maintaining its Great Firewall, to the surveillance cameras ubiquitous on almost every street and block across urban China.

But the report released Monday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) details how the government’s AI tools, used to “automate ce