https://www.ft.com/content/5cc651a4-48fd-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d?fbclid=IwAR1NlwMV-1jKZWbj3Qf0SM86QuZiujrDPOOIdGkFqkhXqfpk84dqhtVYdNk
Yuan Yang in Beijing and Madhumita Murgia in London FEBRUARY 11 2020
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China’s biggest military technology company has set up a national laboratory to research advanced policing technologies such as crime prediction and emotion recognition, giving its first wave of grants to academics across China — as well as one lab in the UK. The flagship lab, which does not have a physical presence but is a network of researchers, is owned by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned defence company that has longstanding partnerships with the Chinese police and military. Its research endeavours include anticipating where crimes might happen based on extrapolating from previous spatial patterns, reconciling surveillance footage from different cameras to piece together a person’s movements and using video to automatically recognise their emotions. The development of the lab, which is called the National Engineering Laboratory (NEL) for Big Data Application on Social Security Risks Sensing, Prevention and Control, comes as police forces around the world look to data analytics and machine learning to attempt to predict crime and allocate patrolling resources accordingly. US company PredPol uses algorithms to anticipate crimes in dozens of cities globally, including in the UK and the US, by dividing each city up into grids. The Metropolitan Police Service in London is currently developing similar techniques to improve patrolling. Emotion recognition is China’s latest video-surveillance trend, with some city officials claiming it can be used to understand a potential suspect’s mental state. However, other experts say the technology is yet to see proven benefits. While the NEL said it disburses grants with the aim of improving policing efficiency and preventing “social security incidents”, its first research centre was unveiled in 2017 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the Chinese border region where around 1.8m Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are interned in mass camps under a security clampdown. The new lab has partnerships with China’s central police training academy in Beijing, as well as with local police in Xinjiang. Its only physical locations appear to be the Urumqi research centre and another facility in Beijing. According to documents leaked to local media, the NEL’s Beijing office awarded a first wave of 16 grants of up to Rmb3m ($430,000) in 2018. The grantees were selected by a panel including Xinjiang’s deputy police chief, Fan Lixin. The Financial Times contacted all of the grant recipients, but almost all either refused interviews or would only speak off the record about their projects, citing the political sensitivity of their work. The only willing interviewee was Professor Tao Cheng at University College London, who was also the only overseas grant recipient. Ms Cheng’s lab, known as the UCL Space Time Lab, analyses large data sets to create hourly or daily crime prediction maps for clients including the UK’s Metropolitan Police. Ms Cheng confirmed that she had been given grant funding from the NEL, but said that her work is not yet involved in policing in China. “Right now it’s just public safety; we haven’t started working on crime incidents. But we are exploring opportunities in China,” she said. “At the moment we aren’t doing anything [in Xinjiang], and even if there was [an opportunity], it would be to predict domestic crimes and things, not for surveillance.” China’s police force is overstretched for the size of the population it serves, with 1.4 police officers per 1,000 people in China, according to Interpol, making it one of the least-policed countries in the world. But Beijing’s broad and often politicised definition of crime, and the unchecked powers of the police force, have given human rights defenders concern over the country’s innovations in police tech, and to what extent the research outcomes could be deployed in Xinjiang. “The NEL’s research will likely tell the Chinese authorities how to fine-tune [their] control of minorities in Xinjiang, as well as help inform police across the country,” said Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, who first came across the grant-making documents. “We are seeing a race to the bottom in China — police bureaus competing to see who can implement mass surveillance and repression better,” added Ms Wang. CETC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Additional reporting by Nian Liu