Foreign media recently revealed that a confidential internal data from Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport showed that nearly 700 Americans, 161 Australians and more than 100 Britons were secretly placed on a watch list by Chinese Communist authorities at immigration, including government workers, corporate CEOs, seemingly ordinary tourists and even children as young as 9 years old.
The New York Post reported on July 7 that the data was first obtained by Australian cybersecurity firm Internet2.0 and later shared with the New York Post.
Security experts said the lists were originally stored on the servers of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, and they were unsure whether the travelers were specifically selected for inclusion in the database or whether it was part of a broader Communist Party surveillance operation.
U.S. media reported that the highly classified database contained a spreadsheet with names, dates of birth and passport numbers of 697 U.S. citizens who were blacklisted when they passed through Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport in 2018 and 2020.
Many of those on the list are researchers or professors at U.S. universities – including an executive at New York University in Shanghai. The list also contains corporate executives in the fields of finance, technology and biomedicine, including executives from major U.S. companies such as Apple, Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Pfizer and Merrill Lynch.
Grammy Award-winning R&B singer Ashanti Douglas, an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, and a documentary filmmaker are also on the list.
In addition, some of the people on the list appear to be ordinary tourists, such as college students and even children as young as 9 years old.
Internet2.0, the cybersecurity firm that obtained the list, said it provides “an unprecedented look at how China [the Communist Party] has used technology to build its surveillance state and how it uses data as a means of control.
“This system gives us a glimpse into China’s (CCP) ambition to collect everything it can and impose its will on the jurisdiction, violating norms of privacy and accountability.” Robert Potter and David Robertson, co-CEOs of Internet2.0, said in a statement.
While governments, including the United States, keep a watch list of suspected terrorists or people alleged to have committed serious crimes, these records from the Chinese Communist Party are completely different, the newspaper noted, showing that it is collecting and storing personal information from ordinary foreign visitors.
Britain and Australia have launched investigations
The list that has come to light shows 161 Australian citizens, including a former Australian intelligence chief.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported last week that the country’s security officials had obtained the data and were investigating.
Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported that the list contained more than 100 British citizens, some of them government officials or business leaders, and that Britain’s MI5 was also investigating the matter.
In addition to details of international visitors, Internet2.0 found that the database also contains a blacklist of people monitored or questioned in Shanghai, many of whom are considered “terrorists,” including thousands of Uighur Muslims.
According to the company, this shows that Communist authorities are “blurring the lines between law and order, counterterrorism and political crime.
“Within this system, because there are no constraints, information is being collected on almost everyone.” The company’s co-CEO concluded in a statement.
Samantha Hoffman, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a researcher on Chinese surveillance, told the ABC that she has seen similar public security databases in China.
She said, “It shouldn’t be an uncommon thing for any foreigner visiting China that they might be tracked [by Chinese Communist authorities].”
Zhenhua Data, a Shenzhen, China-based company, was also kicked in the media last year for collecting information on the Internet about prominent figures in politics and business and their friends, relatives and close associates in countries around the world. The story was reported simultaneously by the U.S. Washington Post, the Australian Financial Review, the U.K. Daily Telegraph and the U.K. Guardian, causing a stir.
The amount of data that came to light at the time was even more staggering, including 52,000 Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Britons and 5,000 Canadians. These included not only world-renowned politicians and businessmen, technology upstarts, academics, bank bosses, journalists and lawyers, but also their families, such as the eleven-year-old daughter of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the wife of former acting U.S. Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, and the names of their four children.
Zhenhua’s marketing and recruitment documents state that its main target customers are the Chinese Communist Party military. One of the corporate partners listed on Zhenhua’s website is a big data company called Topsy (TRS), which prominently advertises its work with clients such as the CCP’s military and Ministry of Public Security, and claims to provide big data analysis tools that can connect personal information, use of vehicles and communication records with a single click and present them concretely.
After being exposed by the media, Zhenhua’s website has been shut down.
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