For more than a quarter of a century, American technology companies have played a pivotal—and previously underappreciated—role in constructing the world’s largest and most sophisticated surveillance state: China’s digital police apparatus. An extensive investigation by the Associated Press, published on September 9, 2025, has revealed that U.S. tech giants, including IBM, Cisco, Oracle, NVIDIA, Intel, Dell, HP, and others, designed, built, and marketed the very systems that underpin China’s omnipresent digital cage.
The AP’s findings are the result of an exhaustive three-year effort, drawing on tens of thousands of documents, interviews with over 100 sources across three continents, and major leaks of internal and classified material—much of it reported here for the first time. The investigation paints a stark picture: American innovation not only enabled, but actively shaped, the Chinese government’s ability to track, predict, and control the lives of its citizens, often with chilling consequences for human rights.
At the heart of this story is the experience of ordinary Chinese families like that of Yang Guoliang. After protesting a land seizure in rural Jiangsu, the Yangs became targets of relentless surveillance. “Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang told the AP, describing a life surrounded by cameras, intercepted messages, and constant police harassment. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.” For the Yangs and tens of thousands of others, the digital dragnet means not just a loss of privacy, but a near-total loss of freedom—sometimes even before any crime is committed.
This all-seeing system is not a recent invention. Its roots trace back to the late 1990s, when China, shaken by the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, sought to digitize its police force and preempt future dissent. The resulting “Golden Shield Project,” launched in 1998, was designed to monitor, censor, and control the population. American companies were eager partners. IBM, for example, worked with the Chinese defense contractor Huadi to design the core policing system, while Oracle provided the database backbone, Cisco supplied networking gear, and Intel and NVIDIA delivered the powerful chips needed to process vast streams of surveillance data.
This was no passive business relationship. According to AP’s review of marketing materials, U.S. firms actively pitched their technology to Chinese police, using Communist Party slogans like “stability maintenance” and highlighting features to suppress groups such as Falun Gong. In 2008, leaked documents showed Cisco boasting that its products could identify over 90% of Falun Gong material on the web. “These concepts all came from the West,” a former Chinese police official in Xinjiang told AP. “China didn’t have this kind of thing before.”
The digital police state evolved into two main arms: the “Great Firewall,” which censors the internet and blocks foreign content, and “Skynet,” a physical surveillance network that, by 2019, boasted 200 million cameras—one for every two people in China—with plans to expand to over 600 million. These systems are not just for show. They are powered by American-designed chips, software, and cloud infrastructure, creating the technical backbone for an automated regime of social control.
The most severe consequences of this technological partnership have unfolded in Xinjiang, where the government has waged a brutal campaign against Turkic Muslims, especially Uyghurs. Following unrest in 2009, Chinese authorities concluded that their existing surveillance was inadequate. U.S. firms responded with offers of more advanced systems. The result was the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a big data system linked to IBM’s i2 police surveillance software, sold in China by the firm Landasoft. Leaked emails and documents, verified by the AP, show that Landasoft’s software was copied from i2 and customized for the Chinese market.
The IJOP aggregates data from countless sources—phone calls, travel records, biometrics, app usage, even water and power consumption—to identify “suspicious” individuals. A leaked list from Aksu prefecture, analyzed by Human Rights Watch, revealed that people were detained for actions as mundane as receiving calls from relatives abroad, using a file-sharing app, or simply being “born after the 1980s.” The system tagged and detained thousands, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. As former Xinjiang government engineer Nureli Abliz told the AP, “I thought then that this was the end of humanity.”
Even those enforcing the system were not immune. Liu Yuliang, a former civil servant, recounted how colleagues who had helped detain others were themselves flagged by the system and swept up. “This technology has no emotions,” Liu said. “But in the hands of a government that doesn’t respect the law, it becomes a tool for evil.”
The reach of China’s surveillance state now extends far beyond its borders. Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented how Chinese authorities target diaspora activists abroad, pressuring their families at home to silence dissent. This practice, known as transnational repression, is enabled by the same digital infrastructure first supplied by American companies.
While U.S. sanctions began to restrict technology sales to China in 2019—especially after international outrage over abuses in Xinjiang—the core infrastructure remains. Maintenance contracts for American software and hardware are still ubiquitous, and loopholes in export law persist. For example, in 2023, 20 former U.S. officials and national security experts warned that sales of NVIDIA’s AI chips to China could still end up supporting surveillance and military operations, despite official denials from the company.
American firms have defended their actions, insisting they complied with all laws and export controls. IBM, for instance, told the AP that any “older systems being abused today” are “entirely outside of IBM’s control.” Nvidia, Intel, Seagate, and others have made similar statements, emphasizing their adherence to regulations and, in some cases, ending contracts after sanctions or rights concerns. However, experts note that export laws often lag behind new technologies, and many products sold as “general use” can be adapted for policing and repression.
China, meanwhile, has become a surveillance superpower in its own right. Having learned from Silicon Valley, it now exports its own surveillance technologies to authoritarian regimes worldwide, from Iran to Russia, through what’s been dubbed the “Digital Silk Road.” As the AP investigation warns, the model first drafted by American companies is now being replicated globally, raising profound questions about the future of privacy and freedom everywhere.
For families like the Yangs, the consequences are deeply personal and ongoing. Their home remains under constant watch, their movements restricted, their pleas for justice met with silence or force. As Yang’s daughter, now in exile in Japan, put it: “Because of this technology … we have no freedom at all. At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”
The story of China’s digital police state is a cautionary tale for a world grappling with the promises and perils of technological progress. As surveillance technology spreads, the line between safety and repression grows ever thinner—and the question of who controls the code becomes one of the most urgent of our time.