Two Chinese officials, one representing the Chinese government and the other the United Nations, have signed a letter of intent to build the UN’s first big data research center in Hangzhou, China, not far from the headquarters of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. Although the plan is backed by the UN, experts question whether it is a “global intelligence network” that China has set up for itself using the UN’s gold standard.
“While the U.S. tries to limit the flow of data to Beijing, the U.N. Secretariat in New York is working with Beijing to set up a joint global data center in China,” writes Claudia Rosett, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, in the Wall Street Journal. The plan includes the creation of a research center to process data from United Nations member states and a geospatial center that would use satellite surveillance technology to demonstrate China’s capabilities.
“As the world’s leading high-tech surveillance nation, China is happy to help,” Rosett said.
Rosette is a foreign policy fellow at the Women’s Independence Forum and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She covered Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 and is a critic of corruption at the United Nations, authoring “What to Do about the U.N.,” which criticizes the U.N. as an abysmal and dangerous failure in fulfilling its mission.
Xi Jinping himself announced that
Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in a video statement to the General Assembly debate on September 22 that “China will establish the United Nations Global Center for Geographic Information Knowledge and Innovation and the International Research Center for Big Data for Sustainable Development, in support of the central role of the United Nations in international affairs.
The program began in 2019. In June of that year, Ning Jizhe, Director of China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), and Liu Zhenmin, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, met in Shanghai to sign the UN-NBS Big Data Institute Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) is the economic and social development arm of the UN Secretariat in New York. Since 2007, the department has been headed by an official from the Chinese Communist Party. The current head of the department is former Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin. The Chinese version of the department’s website states that the UN’s “Department of Economic and Social Affairs has an impact that extends far beyond the doors of the United Nations” and that its work focuses on “norm-setting,” “data and analysis,” and “data and analysis”. The United Nations explains what “Geospatial Information” is: “Everything is happening somewhere, but how do we know where it’s happening?
The United Nations explains what “Geospatial Information” is: “Everything is happening somewhere, but how do we know what is happening where? When did this happen? What is the reason for this? The answer to all of this lies in geospatial information.”
The big data center is included in the United Nations’ “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” which has 17 goals, including health and well-being and peace and justice. According to the UN, big data technology, geospatial information, “can help us measure, monitor and manage the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as improve people’s lives and protect the planet.”
The CCP is different inside and outside of data flow
The irony is that China, which is building a global data center for the United Nations, has so far not allowed the UN to go to China to investigate the causes of the new coronavirus pandemic that has ravaged the world, originating in Wuhan, China.
Now that the location of the U.N. big data research center has been chosen, “with the strong and generous support of the Chinese government,” U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Liu Zhenmin announced in September at the U.N. Committee of Experts on Global Geographic Information Management, “China’s Deqing Global Geographic Knowledge and The Innovation Center will go through final administrative approval.”
Why Deqing County, Zhejiang Province? This highlights a longstanding effort by the Chinese Communist Party to use the UN as a venue. The first United Nations Forum on Global Geospatial Information Management was held in Seoul, Korea in 2011, but there was no permanent venue for it, and in early 2012, the United Nations Statistics Division agreed to host it permanently in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, after an active campaign by China’s National Bureau of Surveying, Mapping and Geo-information (NBSGI). The United Nations Statistics Division is part of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
In 2015, Zhejiang Province will make Deqing its geospatial center, and the UN forum will be located in Deqing. During this period, the Economic and Social Department, which is under the UN Statistics Division, went through two of Liu Zhenmin’s predecessors, Sha Zukang (2007-2012) and Wu Hongbo (2012-2017). This may partly explain why all the Chinese Under-Secretaries-General assigned to the UN after 2007 have headed the department.
Deqing “will host the United Nations World Congress on Geospatial Information in 2018,” says Rosette. It’s less than an hour’s drive from the Big Data Institute in Hangzhou.
Hangzhou is home to Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group, whose co-founder and former executive chairman Jack Ma and Melinda Gates co-chaired the 2018 UN High-Level Panel on “Digital Cooperation” organized by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
The UN in the Service of Communist Global Ambitions?
“The deepening relationship between the U.N. and the U.S.-China billionaires is serving the Chinese Communist Party’s desire for global domination,” Rosett said.
“This setup could easily become China’s global intelligence network,” said Rosett. “Xi Jinping promised the UN-China Geospatial and Big Data Complex that he would allow it to map in detail everything from terrain and infrastructure to human behavior across the entire spatial and temporal spectrum,” she added.
The first reason, according to Rosette, is that the Chinese regime has built the most powerful high-tech national surveillance system in the world. It controls the domestic Internet through the “Great Firewall,” which prohibits Internet users from using U.S. social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, where officials can conduct propaganda.
It was the same surveillance system that killed the early warnings about the new coronavirus issued by Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan earlier this year when the outbreak of neoconviral pneumonia began, and ultimately led to his own death from the virus more than a month later.
The Chinese Communist Party, under Xi Jinping, has collected and stolen massive amounts of data around the world, and “a brand of legitimacy at the United Nations would make it easier for Beijing to secure the flow of data from member states, influence the standards and norms by which the UN collects such data, shape the results, feed them into the UN system, and project the high-tech tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party around the world,” Rosette said.
Next is the UN’s cooperation. “China has chosen the U.N. as a tool for Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ plan,” Rosette said. Last year, U.N. Secretary-General Guterres hailed the Belt and Road as “intrinsically linked” to the U.N.’s sustainable development goals; U.N. documents show that dozens of U.N. affiliates, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, have signed on to the plan. The agreement to support the “One Belt, One Road” program, while four of the fifteen specialized agencies of the United Nations are currently run by officials from China.
Democracies Will Resist
Hu says that many of the UN’s actions, including the Human Rights Commission, have turned out to be a joke. “The Chinese Communist Party is already notorious and well-known in these areas, and you still hand over this (big data) cooperation to the Chinese government. It’s all the more necessary,” travel law expert Ping Yu told the Voice of America.
Yu Ping, a travel law expert, told VOA that it was not easy for China to build the UN data center, but the dilemma was that it was not credible to the world. “How does China explain to the world that its system can, first, not violate the right to privacy, and second, go further to ensure that it doesn’t use the data to reinforce its authoritarian regime to suppress people’s freedom of expression,” Yu said.
Whatever form the future UN data center in China takes, Yu said, it will be directly controlled or interfered with by the Chinese government because “totalitarian rule controls all aspects of your life. A big reason why democracies see China as a scourge is because they control all of China’s resources in a comprehensive way. Therefore, every time China becomes stronger, the control of its authoritarian regime becomes stronger as well. That’s the biggest problem.”
According to a Pew Research Center survey released on October 6, 14 developed democracies around the world overwhelmingly view China in a negative light, a 10-year high. They are Australia (81 percent), the United Kingdom (74 percent), Germany (71 percent), the Netherlands (73 percent), Sweden (85 percent), the United States (73 percent), South Korea (75 percent), Spain (63 percent), France (70 percent), Canada (73 percent), Italy (62 percent), Japan (86 percent), and Belgium and Denmark.
The same survey also showed that more than 70 to 80 percent of people in these developed countries have lost confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Nothing can be 100 percent, 70 or 80 percent is actually the maximum, the most disgusting, even more disgusting than that is unlikely to be done, it’s all at the top,” said Hu Ping, Beijing Spring’s honorary editor-in-chief. “If you want to build it in such a bad situation, the people of these countries will refuse to give you this big data center under the name of the United Nations. There’s going to be strong resistance from a lot of countries to this,” asserts Ping Hu.
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