When Chinese authorities raided the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu in 2018, Li Yingqiang, the sole church elder to temporarily escape custody, placed his children in the care of another family and went into hiding.
The leaders of Early Rain thought they had prepared for a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) crackdown, yet their efforts were to no avail. More than 100 out of 500 church members were arrested in the 2018 raid, including Early Rain’s leader, Pastor Wang Yi. Authorities later sentenced Wang to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business activities” following a quick, closed-door trial.
Wang had intentionally gained weight to prepare for brutal prison conditions and drafted his “Letter from a Chengdu Jail” to be released upon his arrest. In it, Wang wrote: “Those who lock me up will one day be locked up by angels. Those who interrogate me will finally be questioned and judged by Christ.”
While he was referring to members of the CCP, if Yi’s predictions are true, some of America’s largest technology companies may face judgement as well.
Today, thanks in part to Silicon Valley, Christian worshippers across China must use an app that contains their biometric data and other personal information to enter state-sanctioned churches. Services are recorded by surveillance cameras as Chinese authorities analyze and censor the content of sermons. Voice recognition and digital surveillance software tracks their activity and conversations in and out of church.
These technologies, evolved from U.S. hardware and software, are the product of a decades-long project to surveil China’s people, especially members of minority groups. While this system was first implemented and perfected in Xinjiang, where the majority Uyghur population is Muslim, it is now being used to target Christians throughout China.
China Built a System of Repression in Xinjiang – With U.S. Help
Beginning in the early 2000s, American companies played a central role in constructing China’s modern surveillance state. China’s Ministry of Public Security and defense contractor Huadi partnered with IBM to design “Golden Shield,” the country’s first large-scale digital policing system. IBM’s i2 Analyst’s Notebook allowed police to ingest hundreds of thousands names, phone numbers, locations, and messages.
Cisco, Oracle, HP, Dell, and Seagate also secured major contracts, including in some instances to expand Golden Shield. IBM and Huadi built advanced fingerprint databases, HP and VMware supplied technology for fingerprint comparison, and Esri sold ArcGIS tools that enabled police to geofence minority neighborhoods.
Chinese authorities used these tools to design a predictive policing system that marked hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners as potential terrorists before they had committed a crime. Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline and movement begun in China in 1992.
Some companies clearly knew what their technologies would be used for. Leaked Cisco presentations from 2008 advertised routers capable of filtering “over 90 percent” of Falun Gong internet traffic and adopted CCP language calling the group an “evil cult.” Cisco marketed its hardware as ideal for “stability maintenance.” It is currently facing lawsuits from Falun Gong practitioners alleging the company knowingly enabled their persecution.
The United States government actively facilitated sales of technology used for surveillance in China. Before 2017–2018, only a small set of explicitly Chinese military-linked companies were restricted from buying certain U.S. products. Companies have consistently argued that they complied with all applicable export-control laws and sanctions.
By the mid-2010s, as the Xinjiang security buildout accelerated, American hardware and software remained embedded at every level. The Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a data-fusion hub that aggregates biometric files, travel history, online behavior, and household information, ran on Dell and HP servers, Cisco switches, and Seagate/Western Digital hard drives.
American semiconductors also powered the core computing behind Xinjiang’s AI-driven policing. High-performance analytics systems built by Sugon and other Chinese military-linked firms ran on Intel Xeon processors and Nvidia GPU accelerators. Hikvision cameras routinely used Intel CPUs, Movidius AI processors, Nvidia modules, and Western Digital/Seagate storage. Ambarella and TechPoint, both California chipmakers, depended heavily on sales to Hikvision and Dahua until sanctions disrupted the pipeline.
Despite evidence their technologies were being used to crack down on human rights, action from some companies lagged behind these reports. Dell, Intel, and Nvidia continued selling chips and modules for Chinese surveillance products well after allegations of their abuse surfaced. Dell even advertised its AI-powered “all-race recognition” software along with a Chinese surveillance company into 2019. This was long after public allegations of Chinese human rights abuses perpetrated against the Uyghurs were first widely reported. IBM barred sales to police in Xinjiang and Tibet in 2015, but none of the other firms mentioned announced independent bans before Washington acted.
Western Digital and Seagate likewise continued supporting companies that facilitated the Chinese police and censorship systems until sanctions and U.S. government pressure forced a course correction. The Associated Press found that contracts to maintain IBM, Dell, HP, Oracle, and Microsoft technology remained “ubiquitous” long after the Xinjiang abuses were documented, although often with third-parties. Even into the 2020s, police systems outside Xinjiang continued to rely on U.S. technology, including Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs.
Many companies stopped selling only when the U.S. government began sanctioning Chinese surveillance firms, despite the fact that there was significant press about the abuses prior to the sanctions.
Finding New Targets for Surveillance Technology
After building out a scalable repression model in Xinjiang, the CCP turned its attention to Chinese Christians. In 2018, before the raid on Early Rain, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping unveiled a five-year-plan to “Sinicize” Christianity. Nominally, the goal of Sinicization is to ensure that “religious doctrines are… guided by the core socialist values.”
In practice, the CCP supervises Bible translations, censors sermons, requires the inclusion of “Xi Jinping Thought” in seminary curricula, and disappears Christians it sees as antithetical to its rule. Churches are required to display portraits of Xi and national flags, sing patriotic anthems instead of religious hymns, and inject pro-CCP messaging into their preaching. Often Chinese Christians, including those belonging to Early Rain, resist this push, which many see as an attempt to suborn faith in God to faith in the Party.
In addition to Early Rain, Chinese authorities raided the Beijing Zion Church in 2025 and arrested Pastor Ezra Jin on charges of “illegal dissemination of religious information via the internet.” Zion had been forced to shut its doors in 2018 after it refused government orders to install surveillance cameras, but continued meeting in person and online in a strong show of faith.
Christians who persist in underground worship face constant police harassment and detention. Some have been held for months in brainwashing camps similar to the facilities Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners continue to be sent to.
Aiding the CCP in its effort to crack down on Christians is the surveillance framework perfected in Xinjiang, with the help of American companies.
In Wenzhou, the epicenter of China’s Christian population – colloquially dubbed “China’s Jerusalem” – officials ordered state-sanctioned Christian groups to install “anti-terrorism” cameras in and outside of churches. Congregants who resisted were beaten. These cameras fed into local Public Security Bureau (PSB) command centers, where analysts monitored attendance patterns, sermon content, and interactions between members.
While it’s unclear who manufactures these cameras, Hikvision and Dahua are by far the dominant suppliers of surveillance cameras used by CCTV systems in China. These companies became global surveillance giants in large part because of their deep integration with U.S. supply chains. Their core products were built around Intel processors, Nvidia AI accelerators, and image-processing chips from California-based Ambarella. Their video-storage systems relied on hard drives from Western Digital and Seagate.
In state-approved churches in Hubei, officials installed facial-recognition kiosks, fingerprint readers, and ID-scanning gates at entrances. Churches in Huangshi were instructed to gather congregants’ biometric and household details for government files. In Jiangxi, authorities installed more than 200 cameras in churches and temples as part of the CCP’s “Sharp Eyes” program. Even bathrooms in some churches were outfitted with cameras marketed as anti-vandalism devices.
Voice surveillance systems in churches used to track Uyghurs and now Christians also trace back to American involvement. iFlytek, China’s dominant voice-recognition company, had entered a five-year research partnership with MIT before it was blacklisted for supporting China’s human rights abuses, and the partnership terminated. iFlytek also rented access to Nvidia’s A100 chips from a third-party years after being sanctioned. However, it was only after the CCP began targeting Christians that the U.S. government independently realized the scale of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and the role of U.S. companies in enabling it.
The U.S. government began reversing course around 2017-2018, when reports of mass surveillance and internment in Xinjiang reached Congress. Although Congress began asking companies for explanations, the Commerce and State departments still allowed most surveillance exports. The formal message to industry did not change until October 2019, when the Commerce Department added Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, Hikvision, Dahua, and related AI firms to the Entity List, Washington’s blacklist that prohibits trade with designated companies. Congress also blacklisted Sugon, SenseTime, Megvii, iFlytek, Yitu, in 2019, saying “these entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression.” Only at that point did the U.S. government clearly notify companies that the systems they helped build were being used for human rights abuses.
Today, the facts are no longer in dispute. The world knows exactly how China uses these technologies. Company compliance teams have undoubtedly read the same reports; their executives have been questioned by Congress. Their risk offices must by now understand that any technology sold to China’s public-security ecosystem is likely to be used for political and religious repression.
And yet, awareness has not led to meaningful change. Instead, many of the same corporations are now lobbying Washington to relax the export restrictions. Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm, and others warned that restrictions threaten their competitiveness and asked for chip export curbs to be rescinded. These companies emphasize that access to Chinese customers is critical to their revenues.
Nvidia and Intel made less powerful chips to avoid export controls while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang continues to lobby the Trump administration to allow the sale of more advanced chips to China. Huang has recently had some success, convincing the Trump administration to allow the sale of Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips to Chinese companies.
Both companies claim that if Chinese companies were committing human rights abuses with their technology, they would cease sales. If experience offers any guide, however, it will not be long until Nvidia’s second-most powerful chips are used to upgrade the security systems that help the CCP persecute Uyghurs, Christians, and other minority groups.
The lesson many firms appear to have drawn from the persecution in Xinjiang is not moral clarity, but fear of market loss.
Still, if Washington maintains and reimplements strict export controls and restricts the trade of technologies that can be abused by Beijing, the United States can help ensure its companies stop contributing to China’s growing repression of its Christian community.
Congress should direct the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to create a new, explicit export-control category focused on religious repression in China. Under this rule, companies would need a license to export advanced chips if they know or should reasonably suspect the chips could be used to identify, track, or analyze Christian worshippers or clergy – for example through cameras at church entrances or software that analyzes sermons using voice or facial recognition.
In parallel, BIS should expand the Entity List to include specific Chinese government bodies and technology integrators involved in church surveillance, namely the United Front Work Department, which is the CCP body that enforces religious regulations. Finally, Congress should advance the Chip Security Act, which would require export-controlled advanced chips to include tamper-resistant location-verification features, obligating companies to report when chips are diverted or their tracking is disabled.
U.S. tech companies also have a moral responsibility of their own. They need not wait for government action. Perhaps before the mid-2010s, when reports of Uyghur human rights abuses became prominent, some companies could claim ignorance, but now Nvidia and others are fully aware that their technologies are being used to suppress, surveil, and arrest Chinese citizens of all faiths.
A course correction won’t absolve these companies of past wrongdoing. It would, however, prevent new American technology from being used to persecute Chinese believers.
thediplomat.com