China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to grow the Chinese economy through facilitating extensive trade across Eurasia and Africa, is now so large it is shaping how China engages its near region and the wider world. Some 126 countries and 29 international organisations have signed cooperation agreements, more than 3000 projects are listed under the BRI umbrella, and some 60% are underway.

BRI countries are not all investment destinations without complications – some have social conflicts, civil unrest and incipient insurgencies. As more Chinese companies invest in these weak states, security concerns are growing, with an increasing number of attacks on Chinese worksites and workers. Moreover, even if BRI sites are well guarded, they remain dependent on the host country’s security situation. Several BRI countries are politically unstable and could potentially suffer widespread civil unrest that would devastate BRI investments.

Unsurprisingly, such security concerns mean China’s digital technologies for societal control are finding a place in the BRI.

In far western China, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is both a BRI cornerstone, with three major transit routes intersecting, and a major centre for testing new security technologies. Security is being digitised and automated through large-scale urban surveillance networks, big data, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, biometrics, ubiquitous GPS tracking and smartphone spyware. These Xinjiang digital security technologies are now being exported commercially.

The first exports are across the border into what Chinese Premier Li Keqiang considers the BRI’ s flagship project: the US$63 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Pakistan is no easy country for the BRI to pass through, given its chronic civil unrest and endemic societal turbulence. China is to a certain degree trapped, given Pakistan’s centrality to the BRI, making security within the CPEC crucial.

Please click here to read the full ‘Belt and Road means big data
and facial recognition, too‘ article originally published at The Interpreter written by Griffith Asia Institute Visiting Fellow, Peter Layton