Hikvision still sells Uyghur-tracking surveillance cameras, and they use NVIDIA chips

Hikvision, the giant digital surveillance equipment maker, has been caught lying about its continued use of facial recognition technology — and American hardware — to identify and track ethnic minorities, a July 2023 report showed.

In July 2022, Hikvision claimed it had stopped fitting its digital cameras with software able to identify ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim Turkic people of northwestern China who have been detained en masse since 2016 in what Beijing calls a reeducation campaign.

Yet in December 2022, P.R.C. authorities awarded a $6 million contract specifying a wide variety of Hikvision surveillance technology including Uyghur detection-enabled facial recognition, a copy of a contract obtained by Internet Protocol Video Market (IPVM), a U.S. research firm dedicated to reviewing security and surveillance technology, showed.

The 85-page contract showed that the government of Chengmai County on Hainan Island in southern China purchased a Hikvision product in which Uyghur detection was part of a “Standard Configuration,” according to a video surveillance specialist at IPVM headquarters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

“This raises concerns about whether Hikvision has ever actually phased out ethnic minority detection technologies, as it has repeatedly claimed,” Charles Rollet of IPVM told The China Project in an email.

Powering the Hikvision technology is hardware made by Nasdaq-listed NVIDIA, a Santa Clara, California-based company subject to U.S. sanctions banning sales to Hikvision since October 2019.

IPVM said in its report that it reached out to Hikvision for a reaction and got no reply, and that NVIDIA, founded by Taiwan-born American billionaire Jensen Huang (黃仁勳 Huáng Rénxūn), said it had no control over “downstream sale of its products.”

IPVM said the contract proved that despite Hikvision’s rebuttals, the company is selling technology being used to suppress ethnic minorities. IPVM previously reported that Hikvision technology is used to track Uyghurs in 12 Chinese provinces outside their homeland, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

“This shows that persecution of Uyghur ethnic minorities is ongoing and that Hikvision, in what the authorities called its “standard configuration,” can and does supply this human-rights-abusing software,” the IPVM report said.

Party control

Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Ltd., usually shortened to Hikvision, claims independence, but it is in fact controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. Its chairman, Chén Zōngnián 陈宗年, is both a member of China’s rubber stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, and the director of the No. 52 Research Institute of the China Electronics Technology Group Corp (CETC), a state-owned technology conglomerate that holds a controlling share in Hikvision. CETC, in turn, is controlled by the Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, which is supervised by the Politburo, the highest decision-making body of the CCP.

Hikvision is $6 billion in debt to the Chinese government, which, the company admitted, may “exert significant influence over our business and other matters of significance to us,” the IPVM report said.

Mal intent

Uyghur rights advocates were dismayed by news of Hikvision’s apparent duplicity.

“The Chinese Communist Party’s use of facial recognition technology to target Uyghurs and other Turkic groups not only invades the privacy of individuals but also undermines the core principles of human rights,” Rushan Abbas, the CEO of Campaign for Uyghurs, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, told The China Project. “It is a haunting reminder of our capacity to twist innovation into instruments of harm.”

IPVM’s recent findings bolster its May 2022 White Paper, “Hikvision, Xinjiang, Uyghurs & Human Rights Abuses,” which showed that despite company denials, Hikvision cameras stood out as key culprits in China’s human rights abuses in the Uyghur region.

During the mass arrests begun in 2016 under then Xinjiang Party secretary Chén Quánguó 陈全国, fresh from quelling unrest in neighboring Tibet, tens of thousands of Hikvision cameras were installed throughout the entire Uyghur region. The cameras were responsible for a range of human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs, including intensive surveillance of mosques and so-called reeducation camps, IPVM’s report said.

“The cameras were used as virtual guards,” Ovalbek Turdakun, an ethnic Kirghiz Christian now exiled in the U.S., told Axios. Turdakun said his cell was watched around the clock during his 10-month detention and that guards used Hikvision cameras and public address systems to command detainees to remain seated at all times and keep their mouths shut.

Hikvision disputes its involvement in human rights abuses despite evidence that emerged in 2021 that the company had a direct hand in building and operating five sizable police projects in Xinjiang. The company claimed not to know where and how its products were being sold or how they were being used.

According to IPVM’s May 2022 report, Hikvision agreed with Xinjiang police to install and operate surveillance systems for reeducation camps in the three predominantly Uyghur counties in southern Xinjiang: Pishan (known as Guma in Uyghur), Moyu (Karakax in Uyghur), and Yutian (Keriya in Uyghur).

“Hikvision was directly contracted to build and operate the police projects for periods ranging from 11 to 21 years,” IPVM said in its report. The IPVM report’s findings are borne out in Hikvision’s own 2020 Annual Report, and Hikvision equipment has been widely photographed on reeducation camp perimeter fences, walls, and watchtowers.

In June 2022, Hikvision cameras and AI software were shown to have been used to screen all 23 million Xinjiang residents for their “terrorism” potential, using facial recognition and license plate cameras to flag anyone with ties overseas for “immediate arrest,” IPVM’s analysis of the 10-gigabyte Xinjiang Police Files showed.

Dating back to 2018, the cache of documents containing speeches, detainee mugshots, and security guidelines from the camps — known officially as Vocational Education and Training Centers — was leaked to Adrian Zenz at the Washington, D.C.-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Zenz then shared the Xinjiang Police Files with an international consortium of 14 media groups in May 2022.

The Global Times, a nationalist Chinese state-run newspaper, described the leaks as “lies of the century” cooked up to smear China, and “a tool for systematic ideological attacks on China.”

A Hikvision representative told Reuters in August 2019 that the company took global human rights “very seriously” and that its business was “required to align with the company’s compliance policy.” Declining to spell out the policy, the representative said Hikvision was “in line with local laws.”

Hikvision has not replied to requests from The China Project for comment on its role in the ongoing surveillance of Uyghurs in China.

Limp sanctions

Following a run of bad publicity in 2019 over its involvement in the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Hikvision hired the former U.S. State Department Ambassador for War Crimes Issues to make an independent report on the company’s human rights compliance.

Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper’s report was not released publicly. A press statement implied that Hikvision never knowingly engaged in human rights abuses. By virtue of having mentioned abuses at all, Hikvision must have known they were happening, IPVM said.

IPVM’s Rollet told The China Project that Prosper warned Hikvision about identifying the Uyghurs as a group in the company’s contracts with Xinjiang police. IPVM obtained a speech Prosper gave at a Hikvision partner event where the former ambassador admitted Hikvision’s contracts with Xinjiang police targeted Uyghurs, a “problem” that the company should look at, Prosper said, because “the Western world would not accept the targeting of one group.”

Prosper expressed particular concern about Hikvision’s Moyu surveillance project in southern Xinjiang’s Karakax City, where Uyghurs, particularly the Muslim faithful, were singled out for close monitoring.

Despite Prosper’s misgivings, however, the former U.S. diplomat said he was “very, very comfortable” with his conclusion. He excused Hikvision’s policies as a “blind spot,” and said that because it was a Chinese company, it had “limited awareness of such conventions.”

Following a U.S. probe that led to Hikvision being put on an American trade blacklist in October 2019, the company was banned entirely in the U.S. in November 2022, due to ethical and security concerns.

“Their own cameras are being used to facilitate the monitoring of Uyghurs, which often leads to arrest and detention on completely spurious ‘charges,’” Peter Irwin, a spokesman for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an advocacy group funded partly by the U.S. Congress–backed National Endowment for Democracy, said. “Their own cameras have been installed outside thousands of mosques across the region, for example, so the local government knows who comes in and out.”

Hikvision is not the only culprit in the surveillance game. In 2019, the New York Times identified several companies aside from Hikvision that have developed and advertised Uyghur analytics in China: Sensetime, Megvii, Yitu, and Cloudwalk. Apart from Cloudwalk, all of these firms have been sanctioned in the U.S. for complicity in human rights abuses.

An August 2023 exposé in the Washington Free Beacon revealed that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took funds from twice-sanctioned SenseTime to advance components of facial recognition technology reportedly used to track Uyghurs who later were jailed. The Trump administration blacklisted SenseTime for its role in the “repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” of Uyghurs.

Eyes everywhere

Lost in the accusations by human rights advocates and denials by corporations and governments are the individual humans targeted by cameras programmed to differentiate ethnicities by every slant of the eye and slope of the nose.

Zuhre, a Uyghur now exiled in Turkey, told The China Project she saw members of her extended family arrested back home in Xinjiang on spurious charges in 2016, her husband imprisoned for 20 years, and her children put in Mandarin-language state schools against her will.

She described scurrying past police checkpoints and fearing that visits to friends would trigger facial recognition software in cameras installed all around their apartment buildings. At any moment an alarm might sound and she would be wrenched away by police to face hours of questioning over why she had come to that part of town.

Getting on a bus to go to the supermarket, the gym, or a mosque felt like navigating a minefield of digital surveillance. Every move she and her fellow Uyghurs made was watched on monitors mounted on the walls of local police stations.

“They could come and take us away for any of this at any time. They didn’t need a reason,” said Zuhre, who still looks over her shoulder, watches what she says, and whom she says it to. “They have eyes everywhere. I can never shake them off.”

Abbas of Campaign for Uyghurs said that the time has come for governments to “face the harsh reality on the ground” and “turn words into meaningful actions, leading the effort against this significant threat to humanity.”

Update: This article was slightly modified to reflect the fact that the contract for $6 million under question was not awarded directly to Hikvision, although it specified the use of Hikvision products.