Part I: The National Database as a Security Tool
In new guidelines on internal security issued on April 13, 2015, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the State Council reiterated a measure announced last year to put the national citizens’ database to better use in internal security. For a country already deemed to be one of the most authoritarian in the world and possessing adequate technology already to allow the use of a nation-wide system of electronic identification cards (e-IDs) linked to a central database as a major tool in internal security, it is surprising that China is far from perfecting this database or its e-ID system into the Orwellian devices that they might become.
Under a 1985 regulation, China started lawfully compiling a national (paper-based) register of its citizens through a laminated plastic ID card system that was authorized to record only “name, sex, nationality, birth date, and address” — the address being that of the citizen’s registered residency. The ID system has been controlled ever since by the “public security organs.” The regulation provided for validity periods ranging from ten years to indefinite.
In the late 1990s, China moved to digitize this database. By 2002, the U.S. company Cisco reported in an internal document that China had a national automated database of its citizens, containing basic data on 1.1 billion people, with more detailed information on 600 million of them. Cisco was bidding for work with China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) at the time. In June 2003, the country’s legislature approved the issuing of an e-ID card, which was to contain a microchip but which would in print only reflect the same information as on the old ID cards. Roll-out of the new e-IDs was expected to take several years. It is still not complete.
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