Digital technology is convenient. However, the risks and costs are increasingly clear: for most people, it is impossible to live without an on-line presence; the infrastructure for digital ID, programmable digital currency, on-line censorship , and so on, are all well underway in Britain and the west. There is little standing in the way of the sort of authoritarian social control described in this China Unscripted podcast. Denial of banking services for political reasons already happens here, for example.
Levi Browde of the Falun Dafa Information Center, talks about the persecution, by the Chinese state, of the spiritual practice Falun Gong.
Browde:
China has a zero Falun Gong campaign. The idea was to try and use some of the more technical means [of coercion] ... Everybody in China carries a chip with your social credits all that kind of stuff ... so now they have a thing where if you're one of the things you're flagged as a Falun Gong practitioner, if you just get within twenty feet of a police officer that's got one of these devices, it goes off. So they can actually tell who the Falun Gong are. They just walk into a square and tell who's Falun Gong.
China Unscripted:
You're not going to put that on your own phone, right?
Browde:
They do it... someone has identified you as Falun Gong ...
China Unscripted:
Like, would you have had to have been detained before?
Browde:
Yeah, or maybe they weren't quite detained. Maybe you were harassed, maybe they know there's this community of five or so people in this neighborhood, and they've they've ransacked your home, they've confiscated your stuff... a lot of them have been detained - or maybe you're just suspected of being Falun Gong - somehow you've been identified: so then like everywhere you go, they can essentially tell who you are... Earlier this summer there were a bunch of protests, because some of the local banks were not allowing people to make withdrawals. They're freezing their accounts. And so people went to the protests and then afterwards it turned out that like local authorities had turned some of their like some of the people's COVID apps turned red, or their travel app or whatever, so they couldn't actually take public transport to go to another protest... it's like your phone turns red saying, like, You can't travel...
China Uncensored are launching a new show to aimed at people interested in avoiding products that are made in China.