Mapping more of China’s tech giants: AI and surveillance

Mapping more of China’s tech giants: AI and surveillance

ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre

has updated the public database that maps the global expansion of key Chinese technology companies.

This update

adds a further 11 companies and organisations:

1. iFlytek,
2. Megvii,
3. ByteDance (which owns TikTok),
4. SenseTime,
5. YITU,
6. CloudWalk,
7. DJI,
8. Meiya Pico,
9. Dahua,
10. Uniview and
11. BeiDou.

Our public database now maps 23 companies and organisations and is visualised through our interactive website, Mapping China’s Technology Giants.

The website seeks to give

1. policymakers,
2. academics,
3. journalists,
4. government officials and
5. other interested readers

a more holistic picture of the increasingly global reach of China’s tech giants.

The response to phase 1 of this project

—it quickly became one of ASPI’s most read products—suggests that

the current lack of transparency about some of these companies’ operations and governance arrangements has created a gap this database is helping to fill.Australian Strategic Policy Institute |

This update adds companies working mainly in the artificial intelligence (AI) and surveillance tech sectors.

SenseTime, for example,

is one of the world’s most valuable AI start-ups.

iFlytek is a partially state-owned speech recognition company.

Meiya Pico is a digital forensics and security company that created media headlines in 2019 because of its monitoring mobile app MFSocket.1

In addition, we’ve added

DJI, which specialises in drone technologies, and

BeiDou, which isn’t a company but the Chinese Government’s satellite navigation system.

We also added

ByteDance—an internet technology company perhaps best known internationally for its video app, TikTok, which is popular with teenagers around the world.

TikTok is also attracting public and media scrutiny in the US over national security implications, the use of US citizens’ data

 

ASPI

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/mapping-more-chinas-tech-giants

The data and map is available here: https://chinatechmap.aspi.org.au/

Mapping China’s Tech Giants | Australian Strategic Policy Institute | ASPI

Previously, in April 2019,

we mapped companies working across

the internet,

telecommunications and biotech sectors, including

1. Huawei,
2. Tencent,
3. Alibaba,
4. Baidu,
5. Hikvision,
6. China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), ZTE,
7. China Mobile,
8. China Telecom,
9. China Unicom,
10. Wuxi AppTec Group and
11. BGI.

This dataset has also been updated, and

new data points have been added for those companies, including on

1. 5G relationships,
2. smart cities,
3. R&D labs and
4. data centres.

At the time of release this updated research project now maps and tracks:

26,000+ data points that have helped to geo-locate 2,500+ points of overseas presence for the 23 companies

447 university and research partnerships, including 195+ Huawei Seeds for the Future university partnerships

115 smart city or public security solution projects, most of which are in Europe, South America and Africa

88 5G relationships in 45 countries

295 surveillance relationships in 96 countries

145 R&D labs, the greatest concentration of which is in Europe

63 undersea cables, 20 leased cables and 49 terrestrial cables

208 data centres and 342 telecommunications and ICT projects spread across the world.

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/mapping-chinas-tech-giants

The data and map is available here: https://chinatechmap.aspi.org.au/