https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/201...istory/154946/

Beyond South China Sea tensions, part two: The CCP vision and the future of Chinese history (link to part 1 available at the site)

This is the second part of a two-part series of interviews on China in Defense One. If you're interested in China then both are worth reading or listening to (podcasts).

These interviews cover a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from how China is building the world's most extensive global commercial empire via its latticework of infrastructure project ranging from dams, railroads, to telecommunications systems. Part 1 provides a historical overview of the CCP's One Belt, One Road strategy, and their nine-dash line claim in the SCS. I focused on part 2, because of the growing interest in how CCP is not only increasingly implementing ever greater oppressive control over its own population via techno-authoritarianism, it is exporting this technology to other countries. Also of interest, is how the CCP leverages surveillance technology, artificial intelligence, and data collected via its Confucious Centers to monitor for negative trends in those societies that could impact CCP interests. The bottom line is this technology is becoming more pervasive globally and will have significant implications across multiple dimensions.

The experts provide an interesting overview on how Xi is trying to replicate Mao's Mass Line that led to the cultural revolution resulting in the deaths of over a million Chinese. Xi is more subtle, he is using a combination of surveillance technology to spy on his own citizens and provide social scores to influence their behavior. This is reinforced via the impact of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that focuses on "cultural security" by promoting a totalitarian view of political correctness via fantasy history and other methods.

Hoffman: “There’s a concept that a lot of what the Party’s doing right now is based on is called social management. But it’s ultimately about the Party’s political control. So it’s a process that is both co-opting people and coercing people to participate, in the Party’s language, in their own management so that they uphold the Party’s political power. It’s a process that’s aimed at Party state security.
Reference the term techno-authoritarianism

Hoffman: “It’s a pretty good term. I think I prefer to refer to what the Chinese Communist Party is doing as technology-enhanced or technology-augmented authoritarianism — because you’re talking about the processes the Chinese Communist Party has been engaged in for decades being augmented through technology.”
Reference using surveillance technology and artificial intelligence overseas in support of their OBOR projects.

Hoffman: “Yeah. Dual use to inform, say, a rail project or a port project or something like that would also be used to inform political decision-making because they talk about, for instance, using data from Confucius Institutes. Or data collected using automatic translation technologies to improve their understanding of Turkic languages and then understanding the political risk in the region in order to be able to shape how people think about what the CCP is doing.