Uncertainties remain in China’s overhauled cross-border data transfer regime
On March 22, 2024, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) unveiled the current version of China’s rules governing outbound data transfers. The new “Provisions on Promoting and Regulating Cross-Border Data Flows” (or “2024 Provisions”) took effect immediately and eased restrictions affecting many businesses, while still underscoring the strength of the CAC’s authority over high-risk areas. For companies conducting data transfers falling within new exempted categories, the regulations brought relief after years of daunting uncertainty. Long reporting cycles, extensive preparation of materials, and long wait times for audit results had created seemingly insurmountable obstacles for businesses relying on data flows, leading to deep pessimism about China’s business environment.
The new rules, which eased burdens for some and pointed to possible solutions for others, were the latest chapter in a long story of regulatory uncertainty, and they won’t be the last. — Read More
Tag Archives: China
Microsoft, OpenAI say U.S. rivals use artificial intelligence in hacking
Skynet in China, a nightmare Surveillance Network out of the Black Mirror episode and the Terminator Movie
In recent years, China has made significant strides in the development and implementation of a massive surveillance network known as “Skynet.” No kidding, it’s after Terminator’s Movie” This ambitious project aims to enhance public security and control through the widespread use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, and big data analysis. — Read More
Chinese social media campaigns are successfully impersonating U.S. voters, Microsoft warns
Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday.
Chinese Communist Party-affiliated “covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed,” according to the report, which focused on the rise in “digital threats from East Asia.” — Read More
How to Rebuild China’s ‘Innovation System’–According to Officials and Scholars
Chinese experts add context to this year’s reconfiguration of the country’s science and technology bureaucracy
Since the 20th Party Congress last October, innovation in science and technology (S&T) has become a core theme in Chinese government policy and messaging. In his report during the Congress, General Secretary Xi Jinping laid out the country’s priorities, saying S&T must remain China’s top productive force, talent must remain its top resource, and innovation must remain its top motivator. Another key message from Xi: China needs to achieve “a high level of self-reliance in science and technology.” This same messaging was repeated throughout the Two Sessions in February and March, and these sentiments have reverberated through state agencies and local governments ever since.
As an engine to drive this innovation, Xi has pointed to the importance of China’s “innovation system,” a key term in Chinese policy discourse since at least the 2006-2020 plan for S&T growth. When the CCP Central Committee and the State Council announced their state restructuring plan during the Two Sessions, it included a comprehensive reorganization of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and established the CCP Central Commission for Science and Technology, a high-level body charged with strategy and reform, as well as with the overall planning of China’s national innovation system. This bureaucratic rearrangement signals a greater emphasis and sharper focus on S&T and a new path for related industries in China. Read More
China’s Hidden Tech Revolution
How Beijing Threatens U.S. Dominance
In 2007, the year Apple first started making iPhones in China, the country was better known for cheap labor than for technological sophistication. At the time, Chinese firms were unable to produce almost any of the iPhone’s internal components, which were imported from Germany, Japan, and the United States. China’s overall contribution to the devices was limited to the labor of assembling these components at Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen—what amounted to less than four percent of the value-added costs.
By the time the iPhone X was released, in 2018, the situation had dramatically changed. Not only were Chinese workers continuing to assemble most iPhones, but Chinese firms were producing many of the sophisticated components inside them, including acoustic parts, charging modules, and battery packs. Having mastered complex technologies, these firms could produce better products than their Asian and European competitors. With the latest generation of iPhones, this pattern has only accelerated. Today, Chinese tech firms account for more than 25 percent of the device’s value-added costs.
Although the iPhone is a special case—as one of the most intricate pieces of hardware in existence, it relies on an exceptional range of technologies—its expanding footprint in China captures a broader trend. In a majority of manufactured goods, Chinese firms have moved beyond assembling foreign-made components to producing their own cutting-edge technologies. Along with its dominance of renewable power equipment, China is now at the forefront of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. These successes challenge the notion that scientific leadership inevitably translates into industrial leadership. Despite relatively modest contributions to pathbreaking research and scientific innovation, China has leveraged its process knowledge—the capacity to scale up whole new industries—to outcompete the United States in a widening array of strategic technologies. Read More
China’s ChatGPT Black Market Is Thriving
A booming illicit market for OpenAI’s chatbot shows the huge potential, and risks, for Chinese generative AI.
Yuxin Guo is a master’s student studying at a Beijing University. For a few months, she had been following online discussions about ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that produces almost natural-sounding language in response to text prompts. One video she found on social media platform Weibo showed how college students in the US were using the technology to write research papers. In February, she finally decided to try it out for herself.
“I got curious because so many people are talking about it,” Guo says, “although not a lot of people seem to clearly know how to access it.”
ChatGPT isn’t available in China—it’s not blocked, but OpenAI, which built the tool, hasn’t made it available there—so Guo went onto Taobao, China’s biggest ecommerce site, where hundreds of thousands of merchants offer everything from iPhone cases to foreign driver’s licenses.
ChatGPT logins have become a hot commodity on Taobao, as have foreign phone numbers—particularly virtual ones that can receive verification codes. Read More
China has been quietly building a blockchain platform
In a speech in 2019, the Chinese leader said blockchain was an “important breakthrough in independent innovation of core technologies.”
Since then, China has quietly been building a platform that aims to facilitate the deployment of blockchain technology for enterprises. It is called Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN).
BSN, which has links to the Chinese government, is aiming to go global but could face challenges. Read More
How China built a one-of-a-kind cyber-espionage behemoth to last
The “most advanced piece of malware” that China-linked hackers have ever been known to use was revealed today. Dubbed Daxin, the stealthy back door was used in espionage operations against governments around the world for a decade before it was caught.
But the newly discovered malware is no one-off. It’s yet another sign that a decade-long quest to become a cyber superpower is paying off for China. While Beijing’s hackers were once known for simple smash-and-grab operations, the country is now among the best in the world thanks to a strategy of tightened control, big spending, and an infrastructure for feeding hacking tools to the government that is unlike anything else in the world. Read More
This huge Chinese company is selling video surveillance systems to Iran
A new report sheds light on a shadowy industry where authoritarian states enthusiastically export surveillance technologies to repressive regimes around the world.
A Chinese company is selling its surveillance technology to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, police, and military, according to a new report by IPVM, a surveillance research group. The firm, called Tiandy, is one of the world’s largest video surveillance companies, reporting almost $700 million in sales in 2020. The company sells cameras and accompanying AI-enabled software, including facial recognition technology, software that it claims can detect someone’s race, and “smart” interrogation tables for use alongside “tiger chairs,” which have been widely documented as a tool for torture.
The report is a rare look into some specifics of China’s strategic relationship with Iran and the ways in which the country disperses surveillance technology to other autocracies abroad. Read More
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