USA: Tech firms enabled China’s mass surveillance and repression, internal documents show

“Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show”, 9 September 2025​

…surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do…

“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said…

Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.

Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings…

Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population…

The AP investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company; tens of thousands of pages of confidential corporate and government documents; public Chinese language marketing material; and thousands of procurements, many provided by ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the non-profit Asia Society. The AP also drew from dozens of open record requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former Chinese and American engineers, executives, experts, officials, administrators, and police officers.

Though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate show…

Other companies, like Intel, Nvidia, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, creator of mapping software ArcGIS Esri, and what was then Hewlett Packard, or HP, also sold technology or services knowingly to Chinese police or surveillance companies. Four practicing lawyers said sales like those uncovered by AP could potentially go against at least the spirit, if not the letter, of U.S. export laws at the time, which the companies denied.

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IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies. Seagate and Western Digital said they adhere to all relevant laws and regulations where they operate.

Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and tech conglomerate Broadcom, which acquired VMWare and cloud company Pivotal in 2023, did not comment on the record; HP, Motorola and Huadi did not respond, and Esri denied involvement but did not reply to examples. Microsoft told AP it found no evidence that it “knowingly sold technology to the military or police” as part of updates to the “Golden Shield.”…