RFI’s correspondent in Beijing interviewed a resident who is frightened because local authorities picked her up at her mother’s house at 2am to question her about her participation in protests against the Zero Covid policy. State-of-the-art technology is being used in China to track down protesters
Chinese policemen are locating protesters one by one thanks to cell phones. Many citizens claim to have been called or visited by public security agents just after their participation in protests in various cities across the country.
In Beijing, Radio France International correspondent Stéphane Lagarde spoke in a discreet location with a 35-year-old protester named Mian Hua (name protected):
“The police couldn’t find me, so they went to my mother’s house at two in the morning to ask her where I was. When they found me at home, they showed me that they had tracked all my movements, what time I left, what street I was on Sunday night. They forced me to confess that I was at the demonstration,” she recounted.
The policemen located her thanks to the tracking of her phone. She then forced her to sign a document pledging not to participate in illegal demonstrations again. Mian Hua’s behavior has completely changed.
«I am a little scared because I have been signed. They watch me. Every time I see a police car I get nervous. I pay a lot of attention to what I do. When I leave home I delete all the foreign applications on my mobile. I also remove my SIM card so they can’t track me,” the woman said.
*Read also: China censors information on wave of protests against covid-19 lockdowns
Several Chinese interviewed by R.F.I. they evoke not only fears that your mobile has been hacked, but also by facial recognition technologies.
R.F.I. contacted Wang Shengsheng, a defense lawyer for the protesters living in the center of the country, who recalled that one of the emblematic protesters of the protests against the Zero Covid policy disappeared.
«The authorities confiscated the mobile phones of some protesters. Some of them have disappeared, like the student from the Nanjing Institute of Communication, who was the first to show a blank sheet of paper. We don’t know where it is. The others have been sent to police custody for disturbance of public order«.
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