Cashing in on Chinese Surveillance

Cashing in on Chinese Surveillance

How Wall Street is pouring money into the Chinese government's Big Brother-like surveillance of its citizens.

Harold Meyerson | September 20, 2007 | web only
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=cashing_in_on_chinese_surveillance

The American economy may be teetering on the brink of a recession, but there's an industry our hedge fund gurus believe has an almost limitless future: the Chinese police state.
In a stunning report in The New York Times last week, correspondent Keith Bradsher documented the rise of China's electronic surveillance industry, whose leading companies have incorporated themselves in the United States and obtained the lion's share of their capital from U.S. hedge funds. Though ostensibly private, these companies are a for-profit adjunct of the Chinese government.

Li Runsen, technology director of the government's ministry of public security and the top cop policing China's Internet usage against the occasional appearance of a dangerous idea, now also moonlights as a director of China Security and Surveillance Technology, a company soon to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

CSST, according to Terence Yap, its chief financial officer, produces security cameras and computer software that can monitor crosswalks -- to ensure that demonstrations aren't forming -- and cross-check the faces of Internet cafe users against photos of known troublemakers. Thus will China protect itself against potential terrorists.

China isn't really prey to terrorists. It is, however, subject to strikes of workers who don't get paid; to revolts over deadly environmental conditions; to religious activists who worship gods other than mammon and the state (the two that are officially sanctioned); to Web surfers enamored of a free exchange of ideas; to Tibetans seeking autonomy; and maybe, someday, to another outburst of Tiananmen Square-like, pro-democracy agitation.

An authoritarian government can never be sure how many of its citizens would relish its demise, which means the Chinese Communist Party has 1.3 billion potential targets for surveillance. Bradsher reports that 660 Chinese cities have begun installing high-tech surveillance systems. By one estimate, high-end surveillance will expand from a $500 million industry in 2003 to a $43 billion industry by 2010.

These numbers have drawn Wall Street's notice. CSST has received $110 million in convertible loans from the Citadel Group, a Chicago-based hedge fund, which it has used to buy up smaller Chinese surveillance companies. Some Wall Street executives have even defended their investments by equating the Chinese surveillance system with the surveillance cameras of London and New York.

To be sure, leading American companies have a long and sordid record of investing in totalitarian states, including Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia and axis-of-evil Iran (hello, Halliburton
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=cashing_in_on_chinese_surveillance