How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners(nytimes.com) |
How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners(nytimes.com) |
To dispel the idea that the information may be fake or some low-skill demo site, they have verified that 6 of the people cited are real.
There is no written fear-mongering.
IMO, the main question a reader might have is "is this real?" Given the lack of puffery, my guess is yes.
It looks like this one might not have actually been used and it seems like the biggest lesson that the example demonstrates is that it's just one of many tool sets in a sprawling surveillance ecosystem and there's a bunch of private companies that vie the business of police and other government institutions across China. That sprawl makes leaks like this one more possible.
Sometimes it said that "none of this is a surprise", but I think revealing details in specific ways turns it from a slogan into a concrete reality, and gives a sharper picture of the causality and the capabilities, which levels up our ability to understand in ways that aren't appreciated when it's just spoken about as a generality that we all assume to be the case.
The one thing I would personally flag is how frequently people were sarcastically dismissive of the idea that Tiktok was doing anything useful with this data. But given how extensive and opportunistic their aggregation of data is to profile foreigners, it's easy to see how, say, mapping out the global support networks of democratic activists sympathetic to (say) Taiwan, could bolster and empower them to act through their extradition partnerships and be part of the data that could potentially even support a hot war in Taiwan.
I use Tiktok as much as the next person, and go through cycles of installing and uninstalling it from my phone, but I didn't think but shared cultural exercise of young people from Western countries sarcastically bidding adieu to their Chinese spys was coming from a particularly well-informed place. And when the data is laid down in the concrete way it's harder to mentally inhabit the contradiction of (1) there's no surprise here and (2) there's nothing to worry about.
There was a time 20 or even 10 years ago where none of this would be controversial (that i,s the significance of reporting on a topic like this) but in 2026, at least in some spaces, it seems practically contrarian.
God forbid you make acquaintance of someone who makes some less desirable choices, according to the government.
An "8 oh H8" if you will, I'm sure it's already an EDM sub-genre!
China violently annexed Tibet in the 1950s. Trying to pretend there is a moral gradient is revealing.
US (& even its allies) have been portrayed to be welcoming, or at least less unwelcoming. than China, which too have had an inbred commitment to hospitality . to the average foreigner. The reality on the ground is generally the opposite. Chinese law enforcement (especially urban) is mostly hands-off, aloof. The powers behind the scenes have different ideas, but they have limited influence on how things play out in everyday detail. This is the same in the US but NYT feel like it is in their interest to muddy the waters.
Vibes are a big part of why I admittedly despise the [soft-elitist] centre (left and right) in the US (& "North-Central Europe[0]"). These inaccurate vibes promulgated by leftleaning "elite humanist" media have for the longest time (250 years?) "quietly" enabled overzealous foreign interventions
[why can't they just do that world-policing in the manner of Chinese "Public Safety"? Brandishing weapons as an after-thought?]
They are waking up to their own hubris and ignorance though, thanks to the polarising situation in the ME. Not quickly enough. Congress is now weak because of these errors of character
Nope. I'm calling out evil where it resides.
> US (& even its allies) have been portrayed to be welcoming
Balance of power. If you're Canada, right now, balancing America with Chinese power is favourable.
> These inaccurate vibes promulgated by leftleaning "elite humanist" media
The media environment is almost orthogonal to military and geopolitcal decisionmaking. (For folks who only consume ad-supported media, sure–the line may be impossible to delinate. If you have any decisionmaking authority in these areas, you or someone else is paying for you to have better information than TikTok or whatever.)
I disagree but imho this is a much deeper issue that should be left to a later time-- I have to think about it. Very similar to "is (abstract) psychological projection moral"? Tolerating paranoia and other personal but also culture-wide psycho-emotional issues[0] ? Those are deeper than the question of whether that kind of evil is still entrenched in CCP policy. Which is still worth thinking about, but I don't find relevant to this context. There are many other issues that are immediately actionable _and_ tied to those deeper questions. I try to learn from Mamdani in that regard. Idealism.. but also pragmatism (thanks metalman!! As always).. and a huge serving of listening to everyone
>For folks who only consume ad-supported media..
Unfortunately, most Congress people seem to not meet these basic criteria. Again, I disagree, but NYT seem not more trustworthy than TikTok-- where ads are the message? I blame the declining quality of journalists hired at that place (I'm personally glad you submit more FT and WSJ!! Nominally finance papers have higher default standards it seems)
[0] more bi-partisan than they seem (& I'm sure China has their own version of this one. I won't _declare_ that it's universal tho (some Nordics/Greenland?))
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-rhetoric-metoo-focused-violenc...