Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti on How Beijing Olympics Highlight Globalization of Police State, Inequality

The equipment and integrated security systems used to detain Olympic protesters will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this surveillance boom are US hedge funds and corporations, including Cisco, General Electric and Google. We speak to journalists Naomi Klein and Christian Parenti, both of whom have recently reported from China.

JUAN GONZALEZ: China deported five international activists today for unfurling a “Free Tibet” banner over the top of an Olympic Games billboard. It’s the latest incident in what has become an almost daily crackdown on both domestic and international protesters who have had to contend with a brand new surveillance system that China set up ahead of the games. This includes 300,000 security cameras and an estimated 100,000 security officers on duty in Beijing.

But it’s not just Beijing that’s gotten a security upgrade. There are now over 600 “safe” cities in China that have received new surveillance gear. The equipment and integrated security systems will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China’s own population. The domestic surveillance market in China is expected to reach $33 billion next year. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this boom are US hedge funds and corporations, such as Cisco, General Electric and Google.

AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Naomi Klein calls this “McCommunism.” Her latest article published in the Huffington Post is called “The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0.” Naomi Klein is author of The Shock Doctrine. She joins us on the phone from Canada.

We’re also joined in our firehouse studio by investigative journalist and author Christian Parenti, who’s also just back from China. His latest piece for The Nation magazine is called “Class Struggle in the New China.”

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Naomi Klein, let’s begin with you. Lay out what you also called in Rolling Stone the “all-seeing eye.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, there’s an incredible operation going on in China to use the latest, what’s now called homeland security technology—networked surveillance cameras, biometric identification cards, facial recognition software—networking all of these cameras and running the software through it as a way to control an increasingly rebellious population. There’s an incredible statistic from 2005 that there were 87,000 mass incidents, which means protests and riots, across the country.

So it is already being used as a way to control the population and also to keep an eye on what in China is called the floating population, the migrant population, who are displaced by mega projects, who travel to cities like Beijing and Guangzhou and Shenzhen looking for work. This is a mobile population that is right now 130 million people. And this technology is used to keep track of those people, because in a sort of Maoist time in China, you had—where people stayed in their communities, you had networks of control and surveillance that were really about people snitching on their neighbors. When people are moving across long distances, the technology is replacing that. So “Police State 2.0” is really about upgrading the surveillance system, with the help, as you said earlier, of US companies like Cisco, General Electric, who have been providing these technologies.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Your article talks about—calls it the “Golden Shield,” as the Chinese refer to it, and you focus especially on the city of Shenzhen, in terms of the enormous reach of this. I was struck that you mentioned, for instance, that every internet cafe in China has surveillance cameras that are hooked up to local police stations so that they can keep an eye on who is using the internet cafes?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and the internet cafes are—you know, they’re really like internet bowling alleys. They’re huge. An average-size internet cafe has 600 terminals. And there are dozens of cameras in the—not just obviously the cameras on the computers, but surveillance cameras. And this is a huge market. You mentioned that it’s worth $33 billion a year now. It’s actually—that’s even increased since I wrote that article. The latest estimate is that it’s going to be worth $43 billion, and—a year within two years.

And the reason why this is such a fast-growing market is that it’s not just that the internet cafes are installing these cameras; it’s that it’s a law now in China that they are required to install the cameras. So are at religious sites, so are entertainment sites, karaoke bars, restaurants. So, the government passes a law and says you must install these surveillance cameras, the companies comply, and then you have another set of companies who are connected to the party and also, as you said, to American companies. Many of them are listed on the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange. And they are benefiting directly from this created market, this mandated market. You must install security cameras, so no wonder this is such a fast-growing market.

And, you know, we know that the global homeland security industry, which is now worth $200 billion globally, it really follows the money. So, after September 11th, that money was, in the US, in these huge expenditures on surveillance technology. It then moved to Iraq, and now it’s really moved to China.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about when—the significance of when the Olympics was awarded to China?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. I think this is really important for us to look at, at this point, because, in many ways, I think this moment provides us with a benchmark to understand exactly how much the standards on human rights have been eroded since September 11th, because China was awarded the Games exactly seven years ago, in July 2001, so right before the September 11th attacks. And, of course, it was very controversial. But there was of virtual consensus, among US officials, at least, that the global scrutiny that would be placed on China in the lead-up to the Olympics would lead to an opening up, would force a democratization process, would lead to a freer press, would lead to more freedoms for human rights activists.

And that really hasn’t happened. In fact, I think it’s quite surprising how little scrutiny there has been on China’s human rights record. And part of that has been that there—any kind of moral suasion that there could have been, certainly from the United States—and obviously one has to temper this, because I don’t think that the US—the human rights record pre-September 11th was anything to brag about—but any ability to sort of put moral pressure on China on human rights has really been eroded since September 11, and particularly when you see that China has moved to this high-tech version of repression and surveillance, which means it’s much less in your face, it’s four security cameras on a block as opposed to tanks.

And it looks a lot like what’s happening in London, what’s happening in New York, with the normalization of these technologies, and also, in the US, with the normalization of the loss of habeas corpus, of indefinite detention, of the normalization of torture. So, what we see in this timeline, from when China was awarded the Games to now in this moment when they are staging the Games, is not just that human rights have taken a step back in China, but that globally we’ve really lost our bearings.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, in China, there is—or with China, there is the reality that the country has become the industrial heartland of worldwide capitalism, in terms of the sheer number of production workers that are churning out goods. And, Christian, your article deals with what’s happened to the workers in China and to all—in all of these factories, and what is life like in this surveillance state, but also a state that has become critical to worldwide capitalism.