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33/Nonetheless, Li's willingness to speak out makes him singular among the thousands targeted by Fox Hunt and Sky Net. Few others, if any, have criticized the Party publicly. Experts agree: Li and his family paid dearly for speaking out. "They see me as a traitor," Li says.

31/The state harasses lawyers Li hires to defend his family, warning them it’s a political case & the outcome is already determined. A plainclothes officer stopped me from taking photos at the courthouse (photo below), saying a “sensitive political case” was being heard.

30/There's serious violations of due process. Interrogation transcripts are altered. The state refuses to provide evidence to lawyers. Details of the charges are secret. His relatives are convicted of receiving embezzled funds - before proving Li himself committed embezzlement.

26/Fascinating tidbit: A leaked photo of the internal police software used to hunt officials suggests the moniker “Sky Net” was inspired by “The Terminator." Xi is known to be a Hollywood fan, & state media describes "Fox Hunt" arrests as cinematic, "like a Hollywood blockbuster"

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25/Using family as leverage isn't new. In Maoist China, your family background was often your fate. The concept of punishment across "three generations" was common. But with U.S. tech, police and Party investigators gained incredible visibility into everyone's ties and finances.

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24/Experts say it's part of a broad pattern: Chinese authorities use family in China essentially as hostages, pressuring targets overseas. They send agents to "persuade" targets to return. They stalk people from coast to coast, using night goggles and threatening notes

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23/The Party arrests over 40 of his friends, family and former associates, including his pregnant daughter and elderly people suffering from cancer and heart disease. Three die in detention, his aunt is released in a vegetative state.

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20/At this point, it's still a local power struggle, confined to Li's home province. But things escalate dramatically when Li decides to speak out again: Publicly, to anti-government media overseas. He attacks the Party, calling it repressive & accusing it of a cover-up.

19/But Li’s past comes back to haunt him. In 2020, his friend and ex-subordinate is arrested for criticizing the Party over COVID. Li is called and warned that associates of Xu – his former rivals in the Party – are going after him. In July 2020, he’s put under investigation.

17/The common thread running through these cases? The big crime isn't corruption. It's disobedience, disloyalty, betrayal. If you read the charges, what's listed 1st is always about "forsaking ideals", "losing Party spirit", "betraying your original aspirations". Corruption, adultery - that's 2nd.

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16/ -Former Guangxi governor: Rumor is that he was involved in smuggling rare earths to the U.S. when China was using it as leverage in trade negotiations. Another betrayal. -In contrast, ex-foreign minister Qin Gang - taken down after a scandalous affair - is now reported OK, in a low profile job

15/Take a few recent examples: -The minister of agriculture: Rumor is that he was arrested because he didn't take Xi's orders to secure China's food supply safety seriously. -Ongoing PLA purge: Rumors that China's missile readiness affected, secrets sold to the US. Xi was livid over the betrayal

14/In such an environment, the question of who gets targeted by the corruption crackdown is intrinsically a political question. If it was just about corruption, a lot more heads would roll. Instead, it’s often about power struggles. Or increasingly, whether you’ve displeased Xi.

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13/Anyone who's spent enough time in China hears the stories: dozens of luxury villas, obtained mysteriously. The wife-and-husband duo, one in business, one in politics. Not naming names, but all I can say is that it is isn't just common; it's ubiquitous.

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10/After a year, investigators from Beijing come and uncover the full extent of Xu’s corruption. Xu is arrested and thrown in prison. But at this point, Li is frustrated and quits the government. He spends three years under audit before he’s allowed to retire.

9/In 2012, Xi takes power and declares a sweeping crackdown on corruption. Months later, Li writes up a letter to report his boss. He kicks off a power struggle. Things turn ugly. Xu threatens him & his siblings and forces them out of their state jobs.

8/Rather than investigate Xu, the Jixi authorities went after the protesters. Police said they were “strictly preventing” residents from complaining to the central government in Beijing, documents show. Li was aghast.

7/Residents dug their heels in. They protested and hung banners declaring the city government's actions illegal. They threatened to go to Beijing to appeal to the central government.

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6/Residents protested against planned demolitions and development that would enrich Xu's associates. Xu declared an apartment complex, a culture center and a thriving shopping plaza as part of a "shantytown", slating it for demolition.

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5/Li's former boss, Xu Zhaojun, was enormously corrupt, according to Li, which he backed up with reams of receipts and internal documents the AP reviewed. Lavish seafood dinners, suites at the St. Regis, first class tickets, gold jewelry, escorts in Vegas, Louis Vuitton...

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4/We profiled one of the only targets speaking out publicly: Li Chuanliang, former vice major of Jixi, a mining city in northeast China. Li told us how his life turned upside down after reporting his former boss in 2013, when Xi launched an crackdown on corruption.

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3/Beijing is using this tech to track former officials under what authorities call Operations “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net.” More than 14,000 people, including some 3,000 officials, have been brought back to China from 120 countries through coercion, arrests and pressure on relatives.

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Dake Kang @dakekang.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

2/We've found U.S. police analytics tech sold to China mines texts, payments, flights, calls, and other data to identify the friends and family of officials and their assets. They allow police to essentially hold relatives hostage, using them to coerce targets to return to China.

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3/In past administrations, the U.S. government even actively encouraged and assisted big tech to sell surveillance gear to Chinese police, holding adversary seminars and assisting them in attending trade shows hosted by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

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Dake Kang @dakekang.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

2/We found tech giants spent hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby Washington on trade with China, opposing measures to curb exports of technology used for surveillance and policing in China despite repeated warnings about the potential for rights abuses

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34/Today, it has become one of the defining characteristics of a new techno-authoritarianism Beijing has pioneered, one that fuses the old-school secret police and paranoia of Leninist-Maoist Communism with cutting edge tech brought by American capitalism.

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33/Going back to that trip to Kazakhstan in March 2018, I felt as though I had finally solved the mystery of what happened. “Predictive policing” – a concept born in the West & turbocharged by 9/11 – was brought to China by American firms. In China, it took on a life of its own.

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32/Xinjiang told us in a 5-page fax such tech is used to “combat terrorist & criminal activity,” that it respects citizens’ privacy and rights & that it does not target ethnicities. They called the U.S. a “true surveillance state,” citing cameras strung up around New York.

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31/By the time authorities launched their mass detention campaign, they had compiled dossiers on huge swaths of Xinjiang’s population. Terror struck the Uyghur community, as vast numbers disappeared into camps with little explanation other than being flagged as “suspicious”.

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30/Xinjiang’s cities were strung with thousands of police checkpoints and millions of cameras. Massive new data centers were built and strung together, allowing police to fuse data and sift through vast amounts of information to find what they considered potential “terrorists”.

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27/When we asked IBM for comment, they said they cut relations with Landasoft in 2014 and barred sales to Xinjiang police in 2015. Asked about their past sales to Chinese police and the Golden Shield, IBM sent us a letter calling it “old, stale interactions”.

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26/IBM acquired i2 and sold it to Chinese police via Landasoft and other agents. Over the years, Landasoft copied i2 and created their own, Chinese version of i2. They didn’t go far for a name, calling it “iTap”. Zhou and Landasoft did not respond to requests for comment.

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25/In a 2009 pamphlet, IBM cited the Urumqi riots, saying their tech could help “maintain social stability”: “Via real-time crime monitoring, early warning and detection systems, valuable information can be gleaned... to provide intelligent analysis for public security organs"

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24/The solution? The i2 playbook _ fusing data and drawing connections between individuals deemed suspicious.

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23/ Authorities didn’t know who to target. Their data was fractured: each department ran their own database with no connection between them. It allowed dissidents to organize opposition to the state. It was the same issue that plagued American officials in the run up to 9/11.

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22/Faced with threats to the state, China adopted the American anti-terror playbook. In secret meetings Chinese officials concluded a key reason for the unrest was their inability to identify Uyghurs they deemed separatists, terrorists, and religious extremists.

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20/i2 licensed Zhou to sell in China. In a presentation marketing i2 to Chinese police, Zhou’s firm touted i2’s use by the American military and intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA. Zhou was soon positioned for the opportunity of a lifetime.

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19/Lacking local expertise, U.S. firm often sold their gear through resellers, run by a crop of Chinese entrepreneurs. Among them was Zhou Qiang. Hired by a British consultancy out of college, Zhou quit in 1998 to start his own company. His niche: policing software, including i2.

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18/ We obtained classified government blueprints for the Golden Shield, Phase II. They show a Chinese defense contractor worked with Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM to design and build the Golden Shield – essentially, the foundation for China’s digital surveillance state.

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17/Back to China. Beijing was keen for similar tech. In the boom years of the 2000s, Millions were going online, unrest fermented online. Beijing built a massive digital policing system: the “Golden Shield”. U.S. companies sold billions of dollars of surveillance gear to China.

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15/IBM said at the time that it did not have much info about the operations of IBM’s German subsidiary because “most documents were destroyed or lost during the war” and said that its German operations came under the control of the Nazis. It added it took the allegations seriously.

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14/IBM itself has a history of working with authoritarian regimes. As documented by journalist and historian Edwin Black in 2001, IBM sold gear to Nazi Germany used to identify and categorize Jews, enabling the Nazis to send them off to concentration camps during the Holocaust.

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12/ After the 9/11 attacks, researcher Valdis Krebs claimed it could have been stopped if American intelligence had connected the dots. “Why wasn't this attack predicted and prevented?” ...Everyone expects the intelligence community to uncover these covert plots and stop them".

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11/i2 is a pioneering police analysis software invented by British mathematicians in the 1990s that claimed to be able to detect “terrorism”. It came in reaction to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where the IRA set off bombs against the British in bloody sectarian violence.

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10/Looking at corporate reports, I made some major discoveries. Landasoft, the Chinese firm behind Xinjiang’s automated policing platform, had been an IBM agent, selling its i2 police analysis software for years in China that they claimed could prevent terror attacks.

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9/Mystery solved. But where did all come from? I spotted signs of American firms everywhere in the emails. Oracle. Microsoft. Amazon Web Services. And… IBM. IBM?

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7/Digging through the Landasoft emails, we found detailed workings of how this system worked. Points. Tags. Things like “long beards” or “abnormal power or water usage” could get you flagged. So could sharing a hotel room, train, or flight with someone deemed suspicious.

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5/We heard bizarre stories of how they were grabbed by police and grilled on nonsensical issues. Tearful relatives told us siblings were detained for sending money for a down payment for a house. Or for taking a call from parents abroad. Or for taking a certain flight.

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