"Avia Law, StopCovid application ... the sweet import of Chinese despotism"

Laurent Gayard is a researcher at CERU (think-tank close to UNI), teacher and columnist. He recently published Darknet, GAFA, Bitcoin - Anonymity is a choice (Slaktine et Cie, 2018).

“Most of us have grown up with the Internet, through its most common application, WorldWideWeb, for a quarter of a century. It seems as obvious as electricity, or drinking water ”. For the British computer scientist Wendy Hall, this evidence could well be called into question by the confrontation - with an uncertain outcome - between different antagonistic conceptions: that of the open Internet, a utopia almost buried by technological monopolies; that of the wise and regulated Internet, of which Brussels dreams; that of a “commercial” Internet, or of “net neutrality”, which is only a distant memory, and finally that of a severely controlled Internet that more authoritarian regimes would like to see happen. If some people are worried about the emergence of a “splitinternet”, that is to say a fragmented and Balkanized internet, the risk, in reality, is greater to see the Internet becoming more uniform and to see our democracies seeking to adapt the digital control and surveillance models borrowed from authoritarian regimes.

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In China as in the West, the coronavirus crisis has only accelerated the dynamics of development that have been going on for a long time. Through the gaps opened by the marketing of the Iphone in 2007 or research on the AI ​​of IBM, Google or Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), directed by Yann Le Cun, we can see the contours of 'a control society which borrows less in appearance from the icy and dehumanized authoritarianism of Orwell's 1984 than from the benevolent paternalism of Alexis de Tocqueville's' soft despotism'. “It does not break the wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; he rarely forces to act, but he ceaselessly opposes us to act; it does not destroy, it prevents being born; it does not tyrannize, it annoys, it compresses, it irritates, it extinguishes, it dazes " , writes a visionary Tocqueville in 1835. After the breakthrough accomplished by Silicon Valley, China seems today to take over.

Contrary to a cliché, recalls the sinologist Jean-François Billeter, widely conveyed and maintained by certain intellectuals, China is not a "radically Other" universe, foreign to the West. This stereotype prevents us from grasping the reality of the constant dialogue established between the two civilizations and their joint attempts to define contemporary modernity. We must not be fooled by the current context and the emergence of a new cold war between a tired West and a China deemed too dangerous and arrogant. The Chinese control company inspires and seduces. Better still, it opens up new markets. Again, in reverse of the cliché depicting a sort of unified and technototalitarian system, China has built a high-tech variant of the “soft despotism” of Tocqueville, “absolute, detailed, regular, foreseeable and soft”, which places less emphasis on constraint than the consumerist incentive.

Beijing was tempted, when the Internet began to spread in China in the 1990s, to choose the path of coercion with the "Great National Firewall", set up in 1999, which was to protect the Chinese from "influences foreign ”. But instead of being content with setting up a total foreclosure with an expensive repressive system, the Chinese government chose the incentive and offered Chinese internet users developed alternatives based on a dynamic private sector, which has become more that a decal, an efficient and innovative rival to Western technological solutions, to the point, after having copied them, from now on to be able to inspire them.

The Chinese government has groped along this path, this 'tao' of technological development, taking into account the needs of social control and the demands of consumerism which is developing in China as it has taken root in our societies. In 2009, the company Jinhui Computer System Engineering, developed on behalf of the People's Republic of China, the software "Green Dam Youth Escort", which was to be installed preventively on computers and smartphones sold in China, in order to control and prevent access to pornographic sites and to all sites with content deemed "dysphemistic", to use the neologism used by Jonathan Fildes for BBC News in June 2009. Interesting qualifier, which, in contrast to "euphemistic", denotes a degrading way of represent reality, terminology leaving a wide margin for appreciation. The term would also be perfectly suited to the current Avia law, definitively adopted by the French National Assembly on May 13, 2020, which, in its preamble, says it wants to fight the " haters " and fight against "the rejection, then the attack of others ” who “ knows hints of the darkest hours in our history ”. Behind the lame syntax hides an ideologization of the precautionary principle which, extended to language, contains disturbing dystopian and "dysphemistic" potentialities.

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Paradoxically, the Chinese government understood backwards from the French legislator that the economic incentive worked better than the constraint. “Green Dam Youth Escort” was abandoned in favor of another project, the “Social Credit System (SCS)”, launched in 2014, which relies on the mastery of Big Data and facial recognition technologies in order to to assess the " degree of civility " of Chinese citizens. It is not a centralized, government system, but a variety of applications offered to computer and smartphone users by eight private firms, including the giants Tencent and Alibaba. There are of course government measures, imposed on citizens in certain pilot municipalities, but the most used tools, such as Sesame Credit or Tencent Credit are developed by the private firms Alibaba and Tencent. Far from being considered as the digital avatars of 1984, these “civic” assessment tools are rather perceived, in particular by the urban and wealthy classes, as services offering, in exchange for a form of control, all in all moderate, certain advantages ranging from credit facilities to access to social or cultural services, including a range of discounts on consumer products and other services.

The unprecedented situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic could lead western countries to adapt Chinese practices even more. The principle of health precaution justifies the implementation of an ambitious digital tracking with the “StopCovid” application, defended by the government in the National Assembly on May 27, 2020. In a parliamentary report of April 6, the deputy LREM Mounir Mahjoubi called for “seizing all available means, without however compromising our values ​​and our freedoms” , drawing inspiration from the experiments carried out in Honk-Kong or Taiwan, making it possible to operate, via applications installed on smartphones, a collection of large-scale data, to control population movements. "So does trust in our institutions . "

The problem is precisely that this confidence is already largely eroded, as demonstrated again by the Yellow Vests crisis, and that the risk is great to see installing, in the name of the precautionary principle, a liberal variant of what is already in practice in China or multiple applications and a variation of algorithms already make it possible to control the state of health of citizens, to determine access to certain perimeters based on a temperature reading executed by a terminal or a telephone or to decide on the quarantine of this or that individual.

At the forefront of the companies that develop these applications, we find again the giant Alibaba and we see again that China rather than resorting to coercive means and public agencies, preferably relies on its "tech companies" », BATX, to propose a health management offer. This, through the capture of data in cyberspace, video surveillance, facial recognition technologies and the implementation of commercial incentives constitutes a much more effective and all the more easily accepted system of social control. by the populations that it is economically viable and that it can be adorned with sanitary necessity.

Despite the tensions that may exist between China and Western countries, the Chinese model of health and social control is a model that is exported, not only to Asia, where Chinese companies have offered and disseminated their tools, but also in Europe or the United States, where we are inspired by the Asian model for "StopCovid" and where Apple and Google also proposed, on April 10, 2020, a joint application for tracking patients which could be proposed to American governments or Europeans. The British government also seems to prefer it to the French tracking solution.

Surveillance and social management are however lucrative markets which did not wait for the Covid to develop, just as Chinese companies did not wait for the pandemic to export the know-how acquired in this area. In the field of video surveillance, China has made Xinjiang, a desert province worked by Uighur separatism three times the size of France, a veritable laboratory for video surveillance and Beijing has long exported its know-how in this area since the surveillance cameras from the Chinese company HikVision have been used in London for the past twenty years. Chinese ambitions even go much further with the Digital Silk Road, the “digital silk route” which doubles the “new silk route” that China has financed with billions of yen since the 2010s.

With this pharaonic project, Beijing's ambition is nothing less than making its tech companies leaders in the digital world by massively exporting its know-how in big data, data control and, as a result, fact, populations. The Covid-19 pandemic will have created enormous needs in this area and the assiduous and active presence of the Chinese representation, in addition to the World Health Organization or the World Trade Organization, in the Union of International Telecommunications (UTI) within the UN shows Beijing's desire to be a leader in the development of international standards in communication and NICT.

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On the occasion of International Telecommunication Day on May 17, UTI Secretary General Houlin Zhao underlined the ambitions of the “Connect 2030” program for the global development of “new technologies such as 5G, intelligent transport, l 'Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain ', a development program in which China is one of the main architects. And American threats against Chinese firms do not undermine Beijing's determination. It should be remembered here that Huawei is undoubtedly the leader in fifth generation (5G) telecom infrastructure, and on the other hand that the Americans are almost absent from this sector. Voices in the Trump administration last February suggested taking holdings in Nokia or Ericsson in order to catch up in 5G and take advantage of the EU's lack of enthusiasm to support its own technology players .

Because if the American market closes to Chinese companies, in Europe on the other hand, the mobile phones of Xiaomi and Huawei compete more and more those of Samsung and Apple. So here is the old Europe entangled in a security and health ideology less and less democratic and less and less liberal. Avidly brooded by the eyes of the American owners of an Internet already repainted in the colors of the trade war and by the Chinese craftsmen of consumer totalitarianism.