Tuesday 30 December 2008

Live and Learn-Time to Fly




All of a sudden the countdown has begun. Time has flapped it's mysterious wings and once again one is watching the calender on the wall. Days are passing like the TGV on jacked up speed balls and what once seemed like tomorrow, becomes yesterday, and so the haze continues steamrollering along. Realisations like this make one sit comfortably in a comfy armchair and try to take stock of happenings. Its time to slow down, regroup, become mindful. No need to ride on blazing saddles, enjoy what you have, simplicity, enjoy the warm glow of grounded illumination. As Lennon said, 'Life is what happens when you are making other plans,' or somethings to that effect. How perceptive! His statement has beautiful imagery, albeit straight out of a Indian Guru's mantra chant.

A lot has been experienced in this particular period of life, and good chunky, diamonds of knowledge they are too, things that one can take, file away and learn from. Knowledge is indeed power. Power to learn from past mistakes and grow as a person, treading more gingerly along the par carious path of life, applying one's self with greater clarity of thought and action.

Alas, Thailand's sun baked shores are just within reach and I am ready.
Once again-

to sing the tune,
to dance with the language,
to tussle with the culture and,
marvel at gastronomy.

Pikey

Monday 29 December 2008

Slievemore




Slievemore the slug, slouches contently, casting sliver tinged shadows
Picture book style,

Her dark seal skin stretched tightly, a sleekness uniform, pristine on the eye,
Cross-roads in bloom,

Sentinel white face attentive, squint-eyed, deciphering intensely,
Skyline calculus,

Imperious skirmisher stands to attention, oozing, colours,
Electric intensity,

Army of yellow units, poised, energised for engagement
Watching, waiting,

Swirling green guards, frenzied, unbalanced in commotion,
Brooding inevitability,

Up turned remains, from a by gone age,
Relics of the past to come.

Pikey

Sunday 12 October 2008

Good old New Labour






We've had a lot of rights removed over the past decade or so, rights we've had since the magna carta, but which have been discarded without debate or thought.

As an example:

* The government can ban any groups it labels ‘terrorist’ (Terrorism Act 2000)
* The government can monitor any and all private communication (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
* Armed forces can be deployed on UK soil in peacetime (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Property and assets can be seized without warning or compensation (Civil Contingencies Act 2004)
* Spontaneous protest is now illegal around Parliament (Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005)
* Without trial, any British citizen can be tagged, put under house arrest and banned from using the telephone or internet (Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005)
* Any citizen can be imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days has passed the house of commons) (Terrorism Act 2006)
* The executive can change any current legislation without consulting Parliament, with very few exceptions (Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006)
* Arbitrary punishments with no legal precedents can be issued with little legal recourse, based on hearsay evidence ( Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003)
* British citizens can be extradicted to the United States with no evidence presented (Extradition Act 2003)
* Compulsory identification for all British citizens, with an unlimited amount of details stored in a central database, which the private sector will have access to (Identity Cards Act 2006)
* Upon arrest the police have claim to your DNA, even if you are released without charge (Criminal Justice Act 2003)

Monday 29 September 2008

Time




The clock strikes seven, must get up.

Time.

Don’t have any of it, I’m bored, have too much of it.

Time.

Our modern lives depend on it. I plan my day around its illusive presence. I'm on a schedule, a timescale, a time stranglehold and when I run out I am in deep trouble.

My life is measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades. I am petrified about losing the track of time as you are my master.

Time.

We have cycles, periods, loops, fast time, slow time. We must measure it all to the mille second, and use it wisely. There is never time for anything including good times and the bad times.

Time is money, we kneel in front of your imperious presence, and you are the Lord, our God.
Hurry up, quickly, get the finger out! Time waits for no one .But time snails along. Time moves forward and backwards.

Time

I am enslaved to you. The damp air of the past determines my future, the crystal ball of the future shapes the present moment. Could have, should have, would have.

Wait!

Stop!

Is this real?

Am I merely dreaming?

Is time tangible or simply a concept?

What if time is an illusion of the subconscious?

What else is there if time is a figment of our imagination?

Allow me this precious moment to contemplate your worth.

Saturday 16 August 2008

Chinese Nationalism



A good American friend had an experience with a Chinese person that can only really happen if you have lived in this most wierd of places. It reminded me of some of my experiences in the middle kingdon.

This is what she wrote.

I recently recieved a notice from tagged.com alerting me that my Chinese friend Qiande Zhang's birthday was coming up, so I decided to send him a birthday greeting. In the same email I asked him if life is any different for him now that the olympics are in town. He actually lives in Shanghai, not Beijing, but I wondered how far reaching the "rules" were. So I asked about a couple that I thought were especially peculiar:

1) Were stinky cab drivers really banned?

2) If you see a bottle of liquid on the ground, do you really have to pick it up and take a sip to determine if it is a poison?

This is his oh so very wonderful response:

thanks very much. it is so sweet of you. actually i was grown up from my hometown where people celebrate their birthday once in ten years, say when you are ten, or twenty, or thirty. but anyways, thanks for your greetings. it was a big surprise to me.

Olympics, people are just talking about it, watching the TV, counting how many medals China has got. nothing is special than any other Olympics which were not held in China before. maybe the only difference is that this time, common people can buy some tickets and watch some events.

Rules? you mean checking in when you are at the bus station or the train station? Shanghai is fine, like everyday. actually everyday in Shanghai, it is already very safe place. so, there is no difference. stinky cab drivers should be banned in Beijing, but maybe not in those small places, you know that. sip-taking test is only for the bus station or something like this, but not just on the street, nobody would like to take a sip out of a bottle just picked up on the street. so you are right, it is ridiculous.

there are not that many special rules. even there are rules, it is not an option to follow it or not. it is a team work to host the Olympics in China and all these so called rules won't affect us that much. besides, all these rules are bringing good to people, so, why not?

actually there are football matches in Shanghai. these days, friends are buying tickets and watching some games, maybe proud that China can also host the Olympics too.

to me, Olympics is just the opening ceremony. all the culture stuff reflected out of it. i enjoyed it very much. only the Opening ceremony is China. other stuff, like events, are just common stuff, no difference to any other Olympics.

the funny thing is that there was no one English word spoken at the show except by the Chairman of IOC. it was weird. Soul was having an English song even which is very popular now. but not this one in China. what is going on? where is the message of communicating with people from all over the world? is it discrimination to people who doesn't have good enough Chinese literacy? where is culture diversity?

these days, im studying the obsession, stalking, manner, leadership, being submissing, many different stuff etc etc in the Asian culture by watching Japanese soap operas which offer me many different perspectives to look at Asian culture, and Western culture.. also a little bit personal reflection, enjoying.

Weekend in Shanghai means Saturday night. man, cannot wait to get a beer tomorrow night.

Dimitri is back to Shanghai in the end of this month.

take it easy. hope to meet you again in Shanghai.

amazing stuff I think you will agree, none too surprising though.

This was my experience a couple of years ago.

I once had a class of teenagers in wenzhou who when practicing conditionals were asked to question their partner 'What would you do if?' and come up with three responses. After adequate time and prompting was given the students had to perform their mini role play at the front of the class to give an account of their progress.

The first and second pairs of students did the usual dribble, 'What would you do if you were sick?' 'Go hospital,' These types of pre-intermediate noodlings continued for the next pair also.

Then stepped forward a cocky pair of grinning fourteen year olds with a history of being a pain in the hole. One said to the other 'What would you do if you met a Japanese?' The other then promptly and imperiously sneered, 'If I met a Japanese man I would kill him with a gun!.'

I think this is another example of the level of patriotic nationalism that runs through the blood of the average Chinese man.

Pikey

Cheers Lisha

Saturday 5 July 2008

Offensive?



An absolute sketch.

Pikey

For God and Ulster




Today’s Newsletter carries a report in which Rev. Stephen Dickinson objects to the presence of a chinese dragon as part of the proposed 11th Night parade in Tandragee, labelling it as “offensive” and “insults the name of Jesus Christ.”

The story carried over onto the Talkback programme today, when the Rev. Dickinson further elaborated on his objections, arguing that the dragon represented a drift into including ‘pagan’ elements within the Twelfth.

Taken at face value, the Rev. Dickinson’s objections could have been understood from the position of a religious figure not wanting what he believes is a celebration of protestantism to be further diminished in the same way that many religious leaders of all faiths object to the materialist ‘hijacking’ of key dates in their religious calendars.

At one stage he forcefully stated that “we need to put protestantism back into the Order.” However, his argument fell down badly when he skipped over the objections of a caller about what goes on at 11th Night bonfires. (Discussion about 39 mins into programme.)

The incident is also an unfortunate reminder of earlier opposition from within loyalism to the chinese community.

From Slugger O'Toole

I find the actions of these so called Christians repulsive.

The politicians talk of 'progress' and a 'vibrant Ulster' but in reality this is only the case if you are white and middle class.

There is inherent xenophobic undertones to many things I witness now whether that be muttering in the supermarket queue, or outright racist slurs.

The fact is that this has to stop. The demographics of the country are changing and this is the natural state of affairs in a post conflict society, therefore people need to open themselves and embrace their brother and sisters from around the world, who come to Ireland searching for a better life.

If the shoe was on the other foot would we want an opportunity to better ourselves?

Its time to scramble out of the dark ages and evolve. For some in this society that may be a big ask.

Pikey

And theres more..................................

PS: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/22/race.ukcrime

Friday 4 July 2008

Newspeak Triumphs




When is the "War on G;obal Terrorism" not the War on Global Terrorism"? When it becomes Politically Incorrect.

Ever since George Orwell coined the term "Newspeak" in the novel 1984, it has crept into real language.

The most obvious example was when the "War Department" was renamed "The Department of Defence", little by little words no longer had meaning.

Raise funding less than your opponents want and your accused of cutting funding. A tax increase becomes "Revenue Enhancement", you can find examples all around you.

Now instead of the "War on Global Terrorism" acceptable phrases include "the war in Iraq," the "war in Afghanistan, "operations in the Horn of Africa" or "ongoing military operations throughout the world." according to a Democratic memo.

As Margaret Thatcher might have said 'Words are becoming ‘Wobbly’ on us"

From Faroutfish Files

Pikey

Waterboard Bliss.....Perhaps Not




I must admit that I was shocked and a little dissapointed when I read the news about Christopher Hitchens this morning.

The outspoken, belligerent, but brilliant writer who has been an open advocate of the Iraq war took part in a waterboarding experiment to see if the CIA 'interogation' method constitutes torture.

He stood in typically imperious fashion exclaiming "I determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea", but succumbed after just seconds.

He went on to write: " ... if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture."

The horrors of waterboarding have been highlighted by groups like Amnesty for some time now, but it seems that their detailed analysis is not enough for some people.

Incredibly Hitchens went on to describe waterboarding in his analysis as an "extreme interrogation", although even in the article he says he does "not trust anybody" who does not understand the viewpoint that "when contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay".

Ok Now everyone can breath a deep sigh of relief.....................
Waterboarding is indeed a nefarious act. Thank you Mr Hitchens for proving it so.



Pikey

Wednesday 2 July 2008

Tom Yum Prawn Soup




"Thai food is often a contrast of sweet, sour and salty flavors."

Combination Foods:
Spicy Prawn Salad (vegetable, meat)
Thai Ice Tea (other)
Pad Thai (grain, meat, fat)
Baked Custard (meat/protein, fat)
Hot and Sour Stir Fried Vegetables with Rice (vegetable, grain, fat)

Thai Lemon Grass Soup

175-225g (6-8 oz) raw large prawns
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
625 ml (20 fl oz/2 ½ cups) light fish stock
2 thick stalks lemon grass, finely chopped
3 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon fish sauce
3 kaffir lime leaves, chopped
½ fresh red chilli, seeded and thinly sliced
½ fresh green chilli, seeded and thinly sliced
½ teaspoon crushed palm sugar
coriander leaves, to garnish

Peel prawns and remove dark veins running down their backs; reserve prawns.

In wok, heat oil, add prawn shells and fry, stirring occasionally, until they change color. Stir in stock, bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain stock and return to wok; discard shells. Add lemon grass, lime juice, fish sauce, lime leaves, chillies and sugar. Simmer for 2 minutes.

Add prawns and cook just below simmering point for 2-3 minutes until prawns are cooked. Serve in warmed bowls garnished with coriander.

Serves 4

Monday 16 June 2008

Tough on Crime.....




Tough on crime, rough on criminals

Plans to publicly shame criminals could be on the cards


Tony Blair promised to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. His successor Gordon Brown may be about to out-tough him.

Louise Casey, the former head of the government's Respect unit, has drawn up a series of radical measures to fight crime.

Plans to make people serving community sentences wear visible jackets identifying that they are criminals and the possible publication of posters and websites with pictures of offenders are likely to be the most controversial of the plans.

Alongside the Guardian story on the paper's front page is a picture of people kneeling in orange Guanta´namo-style boiler suits with their hands behind their heads. It sends a shiver down the spine until you realise it relates to a separate article about protests against George Bush in London.

Even if the criminals are more likely to be forced to wear high visibility bibs - according to the Mail - rather than orange boiler suits, the plans are unlikely to go down well with civil liberties' groups still fuming over attempts to extend the period terror suspects can be held without trial.

Extract from Haroon Siddique Guardian News Blog.

Scary stuff I think you will agree. It won't be long until the people not wearing high viz will be the ones standing out. Homogenize, work, consume, watch reality TV and let your leaders take control.

To borrow a phrase from the immortal Bill Hicks,

"I'm sure their motives are pure."

Aghh well, break out the victory gin I suppose.

Pikey

Sunday 15 June 2008

Vote Un-Democratic Judas Party




The DUP have showed where their hat lies in the political ring. For DUP MPs Unionism is nothing at all to do with identification with the people of this entire Kingdom or the freedom they enjoy. The very fact they identify with an ideology that calls itself 'Unionism' is at this point in time nothing short of laughable. They have given a firm, two fingered 'fuck you' to the people of the UK, while hiding behind botched top secret issues of national security, using the troubles as an example of their consistent tough stance of terrorism.

The DUP and Lady Sylvia Hermanthe sole UUP MP, who predictably voted with the Brown administration saved Labour's on edge Scotsman from humiliating defeat in a vote that should have brought this government to its knees This is a government that has failed ot listen to the masses and increased the gap between rich and the poor with breathtaking billigerence. Despite this, the DUP saved this floundering Prime Minister and this government to do a deal, which to use their beloved biblical language, did a Judas.

There has rarely been a more stark example of how a political party has lost sight of the wood for the trees. A party that is intent on selling their country out for a short term economic package that brings Britain one step closer to a consumer concentration camp.

Shame on you. All good church goers as well.
Thou shall not.........................be a sell out bastard.
Yeah right.

Pikey

Photo of the Day




This was taken at a Chinese /Thai temple in Hat Yai. I really like the expression on the young monks face. Notice the different dress of Chinese/Thai monks.

Pikey

Friday 13 June 2008

Voltaire Quotes 1694-1778



This enlightenment thinker's belief in civil liberties, social reform despite censorship and questioning of religious dogma, make his ideas essential in todays Britain.

Here are some good quotes:


"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers"

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong"

"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do"

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

"Everything's fine today, that is our illusion."

"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."

"Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy."

"God is always on the side of the big battalions."

"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."

"Common sense is not so common."

"This is no time to make new enemies."

There are some amazing images cast up by reading these I am sure you will agree.

Pikey

Thursday 12 June 2008

Keep repeating.....You are free...Keep repeating....You are free......

Brown got it through - 315 votes for and 306 against.

Big Brother 2008 - the house is now 93,000 square miles in area and has a population of 60,000.

Tyranny in the UK.

Only 9 votes made the difference and they came from the Democratic Unionist Party

who have blatantly bent over for Brown on this historic day of reckoning. Cries of

'you have been bought' were heard round the boiling pot of emotion that was the

British Parliament last night when the results were announced. A smiling and defiant

DUP sat grinning like idiots knowing that the good times would soon roll as a result

of an obvious backdoor deal.

This is a dark day for democracy in Britain, one that saw the dictates of the Magna

Carta dissolved, behind a smoke screen on erroneous and un-provable 'terror'

intelligence. The behaviour of the DUP goes to show how far they are prepared to go

in order to win favour on the mainland. It is vomit inducing to think that they have

the word 'democratic' in their party name, one that should be changed immediately to

'deferential.'

This morning when most people woke up and lift their news papers they will not be

confronted with one of the most democratically corrosive decisions of modern time,

their bleary eyes will fix upon a smokescreen story. The front pages are leading

with the government's confidential documents about Al-Quida that were left on a

train. This alleged blunder comes at the very convenient time, diverting public

opinion away from the biggest story of the last 6 months:

The massive leap towards a totalitarian British police state.


Someone tell me where this threat is. Where is it? Its all around we are told.

Does any see it? No. Its an un tangible construct that is being used to keep people

afraid and therefore allow the enforcement of an agenda with Orwellian overtones.


The actions of the DUP and other MPs have made this a day in which for one to talk

about democracy in Britain is not only illusionary, but downright stupid.

It could be time to flee the scene while we still have the chance. Book your tickets

early, there my be big demand.

Pikey

Wednesday 11 June 2008

Photo of the Day




These photos were taken in Khao Lak in Thailand in 2007. It was the worst hit area from the 2004 tsunami. On this small stretch of beach an estimated 10,000 people perished. I took these phots to show the bleakness and macabre atmosphere that still hangs around.

The beach moved 15/20 metres up land because of the tsunami and left trees on a new beach with their roots still intact.

In the other photo you can see one of the many tributes that adorn trees that are now on the beach.

Scary

This is a video from the day showing you the power of the wave.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TQR9ph8kSs&feature=related

Pikey

Tuesday 10 June 2008

Feel the Heat 5

Feel the Heat 5
(Albums and tunes currently burning a hole in my speakers)

1. Sonic Youth- Rather Ripped
2. Talvin Singh- Back to Mine
3. Augustus Pablo- Original Rockers Vol 2
4. Pagan Altar- Lords of Hyprocrisy
5. Opeth- Watershed

Some amazing albums. Download and let me know what you think.

Pikey

Photo of the Day




This photo was taken looking into a temple on top of a mountain in Hat Yai, Thailand where my friend and I went and sat for a day last year. It was in the middle of no where and we did not see anyone all day. Very tranqil and relaxing.

Pikey

Thursday 5 June 2008

The Heart Sutra





Body is nothing more than emptiness,
emptiness is nothing more than body.
The body is exactly empty,
and emptiness is exactly body.
The other four aspects of human existence --
feeling, thought, will, and consciousness --
are likewise nothing more than emptiness,
and emptiness nothing more than they.

All things are empty:
Nothing is born, nothing dies,
nothing is pure, nothing is stained,
nothing increases and nothing decreases.

So, in emptiness, there is no body,
no feeling, no thought,
no will, no consciousness.
There are no eyes, no ears,
no nose, no tongue,
no body, no mind.
There is no seeing, no hearing,
no smelling, no tasting,
no touching, no imagining.
There is nothing seen, nor heard,
nor smelled, nor tasted,
nor touched, nor imagined.

There is no ignorance,
and no end to ignorance.
There is no old age and death,
and no end to old age and death.
There is no suffering, no cause of suffering,
no end to suffering, no path to follow.
There is no attainment of wisdom,
and no wisdom to attain.

The Bodhisattvas rely on the Perfection of Wisdom,
and so with no delusions,
they feel no fear,
and have Nirvana here and now.

All the Buddhas,
past, present, and future,
rely on the Perfection of Wisdom,
and live in full enlightenment.

The Perfection of Wisdom is the greatest mantra.
It is the clearest mantra,
the highest mantra,
the mantra that removes all suffering.

Emptiness, refers to the fact that no thing including human existence has ultimate substantiality, which in turn means that no thing is permanent and no thing is totally independent of everything else. In other words, everything in this world is interconnected and in constant flux. A deep appreciation of this idea of emptiness thus saves us from the suffering caused by our egos, our attachments, and our resistance to change and loss. It is believed that through the practice of meditation and knowing one's mind, this state of non-self (anata) can be reached, thus leaving behind all those things we once percieved to be real.

Pikey

Thursday 29 May 2008

No Time Like The Present Mr. Brown




A year ago now Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as the leader of Great Britain and the Labour Party. Like a phantom he slipped into the corridors of power under the cover of darkness, known little by the general public. He was a politician so talented and able that no leadership contest was needed, let alone a general election. After two terms of Blair bling it was time for Britain to usher back in some stiff upper lip to the political arena. The stage managed New Labour revolution under Blair had run its course and people seemed ready for some straight-laced politics, they were itching for a change, someone who would tell them how things really were. Gordon Brown was their anointed one, a man of substance not spin.

A year down the line the man who came to power to ‘pull down the curtain of celebrity in politics’ is a seriously wounded political animal. Brown was put into power to strengthen the political backbone of the Labour Party, but now he has done exactly the opposite. The party is on the ropes and in danger of being knocked out all together. The recent local election results showed the true horror for the men in red ties. In short, they are sinking in political quicksand.

The mystery of Brown’s rise to number ten is one filled with unanswered questions. Did the left think the New Labour, Americanized machine spun too far, thus in selecting Brown they could revert to an older style of British politics, or did they party have a have a genuine believe in this dour Scotsman? The jury is out.

There is a lame duck aspect to the whole situation one year on. With Labour’s current position it would not be politically expedient to get rid of Brown, risking a general election that they could well lose. Its do or die time for Brown and his apparatchiks. In reality they have little to lose as public opinion is laughably low already. Fresh, radical, kamikaze decisions are going to have to be made in order to pull themselves out of the abyss.

I am only a humble armchair political observer, but I think there are some policies that would free them from the shackles of obliteration, and jolt them forward into an electable party.

• Pull troops out of neo-colonial occupations that are illegal under international law?
• Stop the march towards the big brother state and abolish I.D card plans and the NHN database scam. We are innocent until proven guilty, not the other way round.
• Wipe out the draconian 42 day detainment ruling remembering how this failed so miserably in Northern Ireland.
• Tax those who have gotten filthy rich under New Labour and begin the distribution of this wealth through a fair and balanced taxation system.


To be any kind of force in the future the Labour Party are going to have to get out their history books and learn from former political gaffs. As Edward Gibbon said ‘I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.

A brighter future is possible.

Think about it Mr. Brown

Pikey

Wednesday 28 May 2008

China's All-Seeing Eye


China’s All-Seeing Eye
May 16, 2008




Naomi Klein explains how “with the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.”

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn’t exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong’s port — to be China’s first “special economic zone,” one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the “real” China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada’s favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to “suggest and illustrate the process of the market.” A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.


Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China’s telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen’s disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: “You call that a superstore?”) McDonald’s and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.

American commentators like CNN’s Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called “America” — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen’s transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called “market Stalinism,” it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world’s attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black Honda. “It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now,” he says. “It’s the crime — they are too easy to steal.” He quickly adds, “Since the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease in crime in Shenzhen.”

After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns. This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished products.

Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment has already paid off tenfold. That kind of growth isn’t unusual in the field he has chosen: Zhang’s factory makes digital surveillance cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in “homeland security.” The other half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China’s market for surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump of 24 percent from 2006.

Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers, most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny cables and bulbs. At the end of each line is “quality control,” which consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof, the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box.

The workers at FSAN don’t just make surveillance cameras; they are constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four, one every few yards. One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.

In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other “entertainment” venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a wider surveillance project known as “Safe Cities,” the effort now encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen.

But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. “The big picture,” Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, “is integration.” That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do. “The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole,” Zhang says. “It’s all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it’s proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland.”

In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.

When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government’s own measure, there were at least 87,000 “mass incidents” — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.

This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China’s rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people’s-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China’s dizzying expansion could grind to a halt.

At the same time, the success of China’s ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this “floating” population will swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers.

But while China’s cities need these displaced laborers to work in factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, “The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don’t want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!”

With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country’s elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: “Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability.”

During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn’t mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms.

During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren’t the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 “most wanted” Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive “streetlamp” view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China’s major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.

The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a “nightmare” for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn’t happen.

Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government’s high-tech web.

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.

In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. “It’s called the 10-million-faces test,” he tells me.

Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government’s massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao’s, have been invited to compete. “We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second,” Yao tells me. “We are preparing for that now.”

The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: “It will happen next year.”

When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government.

To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company’s proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to “capture the image,” Yao explains. Next is “finding the face.”

He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company’s database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can “find a face” even when the face has changed significantly with time. “

It took 1.1 milliseconds!” Yao exclaims. “Yeah, that’s me!”

In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao’s programmers and engineers take each other’s pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. “Everyone is preparing for the test,” Yao explains. “If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China.”

Every couple of minutes Yao’s phone beeps. Sometimes it’s a work message, but most of the time it’s a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. “Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!” He shrugs: “She likes designers.”

Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. “Ninety-five percent,” he insists, “is just for regular safety.” He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as “the internal-security people.” They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of “some protesters, some dissidents.” They wanted to know if Yao’s facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos. Yao was sorry to disappoint them. “Honestly, the technology so far still can’t meet their needs,” he says. “The photos that they show us were just too blurry.” That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government’s goal is not repression: “If you’re a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive,” he says. “So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is.”

Until recently, Yao’s photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid’s birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH. When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition “should be the next dot-com.”

Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field. He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts.

In 2006, Yao tells me, “I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail.” For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company’s proprietary software, allowing him to “build a lot of development software based on L-1’s technology.” Since then, L-1’s partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn’t really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: “We’ll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China.” Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company’s research headquarters in New Jersey. (”Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It’s such a historic place.”) L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. “It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results.”

L-1’s enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company’s ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world. But here’s the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1’s Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to “some large international opportunities,” not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou.

After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1’s involvement in China’s homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company’s head of research. “We have nothing in China,” she tells me. “Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don’t have any relationships at all.”

I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She’ll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: “Absolutely, we’ve sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test.” Yao’s use of the technology, she said, is “within his license” purchased from L-1.

The company’s reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with “crime control or detection instruments or equipment.” That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the “detection instruments” that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents.

“The intent of that act,” a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, “was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China.”

Pixel’s application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban’s intent. By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1’s software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone “every day” with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. “Because we are representing them,” he says. “We took the test on their behalf.”

In other words, this controversial U.S. “crime control” technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao’s goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will “pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales.”

When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if “they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item.” Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban.

When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, “I don’t know anything about that.” Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, “I really don’t want to comment, so there is no comment.” Then she hangs up.

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it “captures” more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.”

It is L-1’s deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn’t just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it’s U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1’s China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.

Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1’s electronic fingerprinting tools are “banned from entering China” due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to “catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily.” He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department’s list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of “face prints” — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government.

Whatever the legality of L-1’s participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying “enormous pressure to open the floodgates.”

The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of China’s powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on “The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?” Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying hardware for China’s Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put up the mug shots of the “most wanted” Tibetan protesters on their Chinese news portals.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It’s a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn’t an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It’s the goal of doing business in China. “Come help us spy!” the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world’s leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to “set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing’s most populated districts.” General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls “thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running.” IBM, meanwhile, is installing its “Smart Surveillance System” in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a “2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010.” By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq.

“We’re at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending,” according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor newsletter in Baltimore. “And just as we need to be aware of how to profit from the growth in China’s commodity consumption, we need to be aware of companies that will profit from ’security consumption.’ . . . There’s big money to be made.”

While U.S. companies are eager to break into China’s rapidly expanding market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of China’s top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than 10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by 100 percent a year. When I meet the company’s fidgety general manager, Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is “We are going public at the end of this year. On the Nasdaq.” It also becomes clear why he has chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: “Help, help, help!” he begs me. “Help us promote our products!”

Zheng, an MBA from one of China’s top schools, proudly shows me the business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell’s IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off the company’s security cameras. Its pages are filled with American iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the Aebell logo.

I ask Zheng whether China’s surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng’s deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. “If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways,” he says, staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. “If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn’t be afraid,” he finally adds. “The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid.”

One of the first people to sound the alarm on China’s upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists. The paper he produced was called “China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China.” It exposed how big-name tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese government to construct “a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and Internet surveillance technologies.”

When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute’s staff to strategize about how to release his explosive findings. “We thought this information was going to shock the world,” he recalls. In the midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the context of their work had changed forever.

Walton’s paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was “mined for ideas” by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a “virtual, centralized grand database” that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. “It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for,” Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: “Operation Noble Shield.”

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for “face prints,” then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Such efforts have provided China’s rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with China’s Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI’s massive e-mail-mining operations. “It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.” Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. “Bush helped me get my vision,” he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China’s horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, “There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay.”

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China.

“I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home,” he says. “We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I’m worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I’m worried about the threat this poses to American democracy.”

Herrington pauses. “George W. Bush,” he adds, “would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could.”

China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush’s America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China’s youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

What is most disconcerting about China’s surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn’t just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

“Are you making a copy?” I ask.

“No, no,” he responds helpfully. “We’re just sending a copy to the police.”

Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won’t let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that “we not only know who you are, we also know where you are.” Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives “this kind of data to government authorities” — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for “Fly Clear.” All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.




Naomi Klein explains how “with the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.”

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn’t exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong’s port — to be China’s first “special economic zone,” one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the “real” China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada’s favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to “suggest and illustrate the process of the market.” A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.


Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China’s telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen’s disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: “You call that a superstore?”) McDonald’s and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.

American commentators like CNN’s Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as “the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years.” But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called “America” — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen’s transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called “market Stalinism,” it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world’s attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black Honda. “It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now,” he says. “It’s the crime — they are too easy to steal.” He quickly adds, “Since the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease in crime in Shenzhen.”

After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns. This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished products.

Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment has already paid off tenfold. That kind of growth isn’t unusual in the field he has chosen: Zhang’s factory makes digital surveillance cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in “homeland security.” The other half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China’s market for surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump of 24 percent from 2006.

Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers, most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny cables and bulbs. At the end of each line is “quality control,” which consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof, the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box.

The workers at FSAN don’t just make surveillance cameras; they are constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four, one every few yards. One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.

In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other “entertainment” venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a wider surveillance project known as “Safe Cities,” the effort now encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen.

But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. “The big picture,” Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, “is integration.” That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do. “The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole,” Zhang says. “It’s all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it’s proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland.”

In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.

When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government’s own measure, there were at least 87,000 “mass incidents” — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.

This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China’s rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people’s-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China’s dizzying expansion could grind to a halt.

At the same time, the success of China’s ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this “floating” population will swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers.

But while China’s cities need these displaced laborers to work in factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, “The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don’t want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!”

With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country’s elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: “Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability.”

During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn’t mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms.

During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren’t the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 “most wanted” Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive “streetlamp” view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China’s major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.

The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a “nightmare” for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn’t happen.

Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government’s high-tech web.

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.

In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. “It’s called the 10-million-faces test,” he tells me.

Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government’s massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao’s, have been invited to compete. “We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second,” Yao tells me. “We are preparing for that now.”

The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: “It will happen next year.”

When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government.

To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company’s proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to “capture the image,” Yao explains. Next is “finding the face.”

He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company’s database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can “find a face” even when the face has changed significantly with time. “

It took 1.1 milliseconds!” Yao exclaims. “Yeah, that’s me!”

In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao’s programmers and engineers take each other’s pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. “Everyone is preparing for the test,” Yao explains. “If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China.”

Every couple of minutes Yao’s phone beeps. Sometimes it’s a work message, but most of the time it’s a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. “Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!” He shrugs: “She likes designers.”

Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. “Ninety-five percent,” he insists, “is just for regular safety.” He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as “the internal-security people.” They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of “some protesters, some dissidents.” They wanted to know if Yao’s facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos. Yao was sorry to disappoint them. “Honestly, the technology so far still can’t meet their needs,” he says. “The photos that they show us were just too blurry.” That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government’s goal is not repression: “If you’re a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive,” he says. “So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is.”

Until recently, Yao’s photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid’s birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH. When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition “should be the next dot-com.”

Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field. He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts.

In 2006, Yao tells me, “I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail.” For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company’s proprietary software, allowing him to “build a lot of development software based on L-1’s technology.” Since then, L-1’s partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn’t really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: “We’ll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China.” Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company’s research headquarters in New Jersey. (”Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It’s such a historic place.”) L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. “It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results.”

L-1’s enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company’s ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world. But here’s the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1’s Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to “some large international opportunities,” not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou.

After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1’s involvement in China’s homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company’s head of research. “We have nothing in China,” she tells me. “Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don’t have any relationships at all.”

I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She’ll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: “Absolutely, we’ve sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test.” Yao’s use of the technology, she said, is “within his license” purchased from L-1.

The company’s reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with “crime control or detection instruments or equipment.” That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the “detection instruments” that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents.

“The intent of that act,” a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, “was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China.”

Pixel’s application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban’s intent. By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1’s software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone “every day” with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. “Because we are representing them,” he says. “We took the test on their behalf.”

In other words, this controversial U.S. “crime control” technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao’s goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will “pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales.”

When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if “they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item.” Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban.

When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, “I don’t know anything about that.” Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, “I really don’t want to comment, so there is no comment.” Then she hangs up.

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it “captures” more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.”

It is L-1’s deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn’t just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it’s U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1’s China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.

Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1’s electronic fingerprinting tools are “banned from entering China” due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to “catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily.” He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department’s list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of “face prints” — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government.

Whatever the legality of L-1’s participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying “enormous pressure to open the floodgates.”

The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of China’s powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on “The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?” Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying hardware for China’s Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put up the mug shots of the “most wanted” Tibetan protesters on their Chinese news portals.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It’s a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn’t an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It’s the goal of doing business in China. “Come help us spy!” the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world’s leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to “set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing’s most populated districts.” General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls “thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running.” IBM, meanwhile, is installing its “Smart Surveillance System” in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a “2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010.” By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq.

“We’re at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending,” according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor newsletter in Baltimore. “And just as we need to be aware of how to profit from the growth in China’s commodity consumption, we need to be aware of companies that will profit from ’security consumption.’ . . . There’s big money to be made.”

While U.S. companies are eager to break into China’s rapidly expanding market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of China’s top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than 10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by 100 percent a year. When I meet the company’s fidgety general manager, Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is “We are going public at the end of this year. On the Nasdaq.” It also becomes clear why he has chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: “Help, help, help!” he begs me. “Help us promote our products!”

Zheng, an MBA from one of China’s top schools, proudly shows me the business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell’s IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off the company’s security cameras. Its pages are filled with American iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the Aebell logo.

I ask Zheng whether China’s surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng’s deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. “If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways,” he says, staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. “If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn’t be afraid,” he finally adds. “The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid.”

One of the first people to sound the alarm on China’s upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists. The paper he produced was called “China’s Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People’s Republic of China.” It exposed how big-name tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese government to construct “a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and Internet surveillance technologies.”

When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute’s staff to strategize about how to release his explosive findings. “We thought this information was going to shock the world,” he recalls. In the midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the context of their work had changed forever.

Walton’s paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was “mined for ideas” by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a “virtual, centralized grand database” that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. “It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for,” Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: “Operation Noble Shield.”

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for “face prints,” then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Such efforts have provided China’s rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with China’s Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI’s massive e-mail-mining operations. “It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.” Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. “Bush helped me get my vision,” he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China’s horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, “There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay.”

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China.

“I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home,” he says. “We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I’m worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I’m worried about the threat this poses to American democracy.”

Herrington pauses. “George W. Bush,” he adds, “would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could.”

China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush’s America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China’s youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

What is most disconcerting about China’s surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn’t just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

“Are you making a copy?” I ask.

“No, no,” he responds helpfully. “We’re just sending a copy to the police.”

Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won’t let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that “we not only know who you are, we also know where you are.” Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives “this kind of data to government authorities” — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for “Fly Clear.” All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.