China Goes Full "Minority Report", Creates "Pre-Crime" Program
By Tyler Durden
By now, the world is largely familiar with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s fabled “Tigers and Flies” campaign.
Since taking office in 2013, Xi has embarked on an ambitious effort to root out party corruption and ensure that the directives passed down from on high in the Politburo are executed faithfully among the sprawling rank and file. As The Atlantic wrote last year, the discipline “problem” is “made more urgent by a slowing economy,” an economy which desperately needs to be reformed.
“Reform, however, requires the ability to enact policy,” The Atlantic flatly adds. “That in turn necessitates bureaucrats who follow the central government’s orders.”
Publicly there have been more than 1,500 announced cases against party officials. But that’s just “publicly.” Knowing the Party’s reputation for “disappearing” those who “disappoint” or otherwise act in morally objectionable ways, the real number is impossible to know but is likely orders of magnitude higher.
When China’s stock market began to crash last summer as the country’s margin “miracle” finally buckled under the weight of the millions of illiterate daytrading housewives who poured their life savings into everything from umbrella manufacturers to industrial companies-turned P2P outfits, Beijing extended the corruption probe to those “responsible” for the equity meltdown.
Soon, the quest for stock market “manipulators” and those (like journalists) who would otherwise seek to harm the national interest by, well, by reporting the facts became part and parcel of a kind of mini Tigers and Flies campaign focused specifically on China’s financial markets. That campaign eventually ensnared quite a few officials, prominent money managers, and eminent businessmen, including Guo Guangchang, a self-styled “Chinese Warren Buffett.”
But all of this wasn’t good enough for China. No, a “true” police state must be able to monitor all things at all times and prevent transgressions against the prevailing order before they happen. So more “Minority Report” than NSA.
This is especially true now that Beijing’s quest to rein in “zombie companies” and curb overcapacity is likely to mean hundreds of thousands of industrial job losses and thus quite a bit of grumbling among the downtrodden (and recently jobless) masses.
Well don’t look now, but China is attempting to use big data, a military contractor, and a camera network known as “Skynet” to predict crimes before they happen.
“China’s effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime,” Bloomberg reports. “The Communist Party has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”
(“Big Uncle” Xi is watching)
Make no mistake, China is a fertile testing ground for such an experiment because, well, because the public has no rights.
“The program is unprecedented because there are no safeguards …read more
Source: China Goes Full "Minority Report", Creates "Pre-Crime" Program
