China is exporting its AI surveillance state
Martin Beraja
Former US President George H.W. Bush once remarked that, “No nation on Earth has discovered a way to import the world’s goods and services while stopping foreign ideas at the border.”
In an age when democracies dominated the technological frontier, the ideas Bush had in mind were those associated with America’s own model of political economy.
But now that China has become a leading innovator in artificial intelligence, might the same economic integration move countries in the opposite direction? This question is particularly relevant to developing countries, since many are not only institutionally fragile, but also increasingly connected to China via trade, foreign aid, loans and investments.
While AI has been hailed as the basis for a “fourth industrial revolution,” it is also bringing many new challenges to the fore. AI technologies have the potential to drive economic growth in the coming years, but also to undermine democracies, aid autocrats’ pursuit of social control and empower “surveillance capitalists” who manipulate our behavior and profit from the data trails we leave online.
Since China has aggressively deployed AI-powered facial recognition to support its own surveillance state, we recently set out to explore the patterns and political consequences of trade in these technologies.
After constructing a database for global trade in facial-recognition AI from 2008 to 2021, we found 1,636 deals from 36 exporting countries to 136 importing countries. From this dataset, we document three developments. First, China has a comparative advantage in facial-recognition AI.
It exports to roughly twice as many countries as the United States does (83 versus 57 links), and it has about 10 per cent more trade deals (238 versus 211). Moreover, its comparative advan- tage in facial-recognition AI is larger than in other frontier-technology exports, such as radioactive materials, steam turbines and laser and other beam processes.
While different factors may have contributed to China’s comparative advantage, we know that the Chinese government has made global dominance in AI an explicit developmental and strategic goal, and that the facial-recognition AI industry has benefited from its demand for surveillance technology, often receiving access to large government datasets.
Second, we find that autocracies and weak democracies are more likely to import facial-recognition AI from China. While the US predominantly exports the technology to mature democracies (these account for roughly twothirds of its links or three-quarters of its deals), China exports roughly equal amounts to mature democracies and autocracies or weak democracies.
Does China have an autocratic bias or is it simply exporting more to autocracies and weak democracies across all products? When we compared China’s exports of facial-recognition AI to its exports of other frontier technologies, we found that facial-recognition AI is the only technology for which China displays an autocratic bias. Equally notable, we found no such bias when investigating the US
One potential explanation for this difference is that autocracies and weak democracies might be turning specifically to China for surveillance technologies. That brings us to our third finding: autocracies and weak democracies are more likely to import facial-recognition AI from China in years when they experience domestic unrest.
The data make clear that weak democracies and autocracies tend to import surveillance AI from China, but not from the US, during years of unrest, rather than preemptively or after the fact. Imports of military technology follow a similar pattern. By contrast, we do not find that mature democracies import more facial-recognition AI in response to unrest.
A final question concerns broader institutional changes in these countries. Our analysis shows that imports of Chinese surveillance AI during episodes of domestic unrest are indeed associated with a country’s elections becoming less fair, less peaceful and less credible overall. And a similar pattern appears to hold with imports of US surveillance AI, though this finding is less precisely estimated.
At the same time, we do not find any association between surveillance AI imports and institutional quality among mature democracies.
"But now that China has become a leading innovator in artificial intelligence, might the same economic integration move countries in the opposite direction? This question is particularly relevant to developing countries, since many are not only institutionally fragile, but also increasingly connected to China via trade, foreign aid, loans and investments."