December 10, 2018 Updated: December 10, 2018Share
WASHINGTON—While the West only started to notice fairly recently the espionage and potential security threat posed by Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, some China insiders have long known that the company has always been a part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
It toes the party line very closely, for example, regarding the persecution of Falun Gong, a peaceful mind-body-spirit practice similar in some ways to Buddhism. In cooperating with that persecution, Huawei has developed tools that should be of concern to everyone around the world, not just the practitioners of Falun Gong in China.
Persecution
In July 1999 then-dictator Jiang Zemin began a campaign to eradicate the Falun Gong practice out of fear at the large numbers of Chinese who found its traditional moral teachings more attractive than the party’s atheist ideology.
New York resident Mindy, who was reluctant to use her surname as her parents are still in China, came to the United States from China in 2009. She remembers that as early as in 1999, when the persecution of Falun Gong had just started, Huawei adopted a policy of not employing Falun Gong practitioners.
She said that in 1999, she was a graduate student in Zhejiang University.
There was a Falun Gong practitioner in the same university who studied computer science and graduated in that year. Before he graduated, he had already been recruited by Huawei, which needed IT staff badly at that time.
A man walks past a Huawei store in Beijing on Dec. 10, 2018. (GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images)
However, when he was about to sign a formal contract with Huawei after graduating, he found that there was an item in the contract stipulating that all Huawei employees needed to guarantee that they didn’t practice Falun Gong.
“This Falun Gong practitioner didn’t want to sign this kind of contract. As a result, he couldn’t be employed by Huawei. And Huawei not only had this item in the contract, but also actively asked every would-be-employee if they practiced Falun Gong,” Mindy said.
Mindy also remembers that during her nearly two-year marriage with a Huawei IT engineer, who was also a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), she once saw a Huawei Employee Handbook, which also had an item forbidding the employees to practice Falun Gong.
The Minghui website, which serves as a clearinghouse for information about the persecution of Falun Gong, reported on Aug. 2, 2007, about the case of Wu Xia. This 27-year-old female Falun Gong practitioner and Huawei employee was dispatched to No. 1 Factory of Taijinbao Company (a Huawei supplier in Suzhou City) to work on quality control, together with her colleague Peng Weifeng. When Peng found out that Wu Xia was a Falun Gong practitioner, he reported Wu Xia to her manager.
On June 1, 2007, two Taiwanese managers of Taijinbao Company took Wu to the police station. The next day Wu was transferred to the Wujiang City Detention Center in Suzhou City.
Another Minghui report on Feb. 26, 2008 says that Wu Xia was given a three-year jail term in Dec. 2007, and was held at Nantong Women’s Prison in Jiangsu Province. The report says that she had suffered severe mental and physical damage there and was not in good condition.
No updated information about Wu Xia can be found.
Another Huawei employee, who has been persecuted for his connection with Falun Gong is Liu Guangrong. According to a Minghui report, Liu worked at the canteen of the European Headquarters of Huawei Technologies in Dusseldorf, Germany, and was dismissed by the company in September 2008, after he told a Chinese co-worker on the subway on his way to work about the persecution of Falun Gong and the Quit-the-CCP movement.
“The colleague immediately reported their conversation to Liu Guangrong’s departmental chief. The chief told Mr. Liu, ‘You must not talk to the Chinese staff about Falun Gong and the Quit-the-CCP movement. Our company has regulations that do not allow the staff to talk about these sensitive topics. It will do you no good if you talk about these subjects,’” the report says.
Censoring and Spying
Huawei has taken far more consequential actions regarding the persecution of Falun Gong than simply policing its own employees. It has helped put in place the tools used by the Chinese regime to track Chinese citizens and censor what information they have access to, enabling the persecution.
A 172-page 2015 internal, classified document of Huawei was leaked this year and circulated on the Internet. The file was entitled “VCM (video content management) Operation Guide,” and was used to train the Chinese regime’s internet police how to monitor, analyze and process video content in real time. The police were expected to send out alerts should they find anything “suspicious.”
A Chinese police SWAT team vehicle parked on Tiananmen Square in Beijing on March 14, 2012. (GOH CHAI HIN/AFP/GettyImages)
According to Chinese commentator Chen Simin, this leaked document shows Huawei’s deep involvement with CCP’s “Golden Shield Project” and “Skynet System.” The former is used to block information, and the latter for surveillance of the whole society.
By blocking information, the Chinese regime works to prevent the Chinese people from learning about the massive violations of human rights carried out in the persecution of Falun Gong, as well as the truth about this spiritual practice.
The surveillance tools Huawei has helped develop are used for many purposes, but among them is the tracking of Falun Gong practitioners.
Chen said that the initial demands for the Golden Shield Project came from the Public Security Bureau and the “610 Office” system, whose sole task was to persecute Falun Gong.
Social Credit Scores Going International
The Skynet System identifies an individual through facial recognition technology and then calls up the regime’s database on the person. That database now gives each person a “social credit” score, indicating the degree to which they align with the regime’s priorities.
The competence Huawei has developed in establishing this vast system may be used to collect data outside China.
Yu Chao, a U.S. system engineer said that Americans and people in other countries should be very worried about the possibility, which is very likely, of Huawei collecting mass data on Americans and people from other countries via their devices and networks. This information can then be used to compile a social credit score on non-Chinese.
“The gloomy picture is,” Yu said, “although the CCP won’t use Americans’ ‘social credit scores’ to stop them from buying airplane tickets, they can gain very deep knowledge of virtually everything of someone who is in their database, and use this knowledge when needed. And that is really, really terrifying.”
Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/with-persecution-of-falun-gong-huawei-develops-tools-of-repression_2735336.html
A man checks surveillance cameras on Tiananamen Square in Beijing on Oct. 31, 2013. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)