A cybersecurity researcher using the pseudonym NetAskari discovered how exposed foreign journalists were when he clicked a tab labeled ‘Inquiry for journalist files’ on an unsecured Chinese web dashboard. Expecting dummy data, he instead found a detailed database of nearly every foreign reporter based in Beijing around 2021: passport photos from the entry/exit bureau, private phone numbers, visa records, dates of birth — and his own personal information logged on a police watchlist.
‘It was more interesting than shocking,’ NetAskari said. ‘When you work as a journalist in China, you basically assume you are always on their radar. But what surprised me was simply how easy it was to access this highly sensitive system.’
The panel he accessed was a demonstration version of a remote tracking system built for the Public Security Bureau in Zhangjiakou, the Hebei city that hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics. Although labeled a test interface, it contained real datasets and illustrated the direction of China’s surveillance architecture: no longer a patchwork of street cameras but a fused, always-on, predictive social-control platform.
China already operates the world’s largest CCTV network and has launched initiatives such as the Xueliang (‘Bright Eyes’) project to merge isolated surveillance systems. The Zhangjiakou dashboard showed how granular that fusion can be: the system can log the exact train carriage and seat a person used when arriving from Beijing or Shanghai, and it can ingest photos from facial-recognition gates at local ski resorts. The movements of people NetAskari knew who had recently skied there were precisely plotted with detailed trajectories.
‘The idea is simply to process as much data as possible from as many sensors as possible in real time,’ the researcher said. The platform also records everyday behaviors — gasoline purchases, regular shopping locations, and whether someone frequently visits ‘petition areas’ — attempting to stitch physical movements, consumption habits and digital traces into a single ‘holistic personnel archive.’
Foreigners, and especially journalists from Western countries, are given particular attention. The dashboard’s ‘smart report’ indicators showed a disproportionate focus on citizens of the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ countries: the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In the system’s backend, some foreign reporters are flagged with a special real-time tag described as ‘trackable.’ When a tagged person enters a jurisdiction, the platform can trigger automatic alerts for local police.
For independent journalism, that capability is existential. In the past, reporters could sometimes shake tailing plainclothes officers by relying on experience and intuition. Automated, data-driven policing narrows those options. With access to mobile payment records, ticket purchases and social-network connections, authorities can anticipate an individual’s itinerary and tailor responses so that a visiting journalist sees only what the police intend. If the system detects interactions between a reporter and local sources, authorities can contact and pressure those sources directly, undermining the possibility of ‘under-the-radar’ reporting.
A central strength of the platform is group analysis and relationship modeling. Instead of relying on resource-intensive manual surveillance, the system auto-generates network graphs that visualize connections: who meets whom, where and for how long, based on camera captures and other sensor data. That capability turns interpersonal relationships into analyzable, searchable structures.
Elements of this approach have been under development for years. In 2019, a major Chinese tech company filed a patent for ‘holistic relationship models’ intended to map travel, call records and vehicle use. In a more recent procurement, a Shanghai public security bureau awarded a contract for a ‘Holistic Personnel Archive System.’ These projects signal an institutional move from error-prone manual methods to automated, continuous monitoring.
Observers note that democratic countries also face controversies over surveillance tools and data analytics firms. But, as NetAskari observed, the context differs: ‘In Western democracies, there are debates… In China, this debate doesn’t exist at all. The police and the Ministry of State Security just do whatever they want with relatively little oversight.’
The practical effect is stark. Whether a foreign correspondent walking Beijing’s hutongs or a tourist on a ski holiday, people are rendered as entries in a massive data dashboard: faces, movement traces, transaction histories and social connections convertible into patterns and vectors. NetAskari summed up the system’s logic: people become a ‘datamass’ that can be controlled, shaped and coerced as needed.
The Zhangjiakou demonstration panel is a rare, concrete glimpse into how surveillance hardware, commerce, transport and online footprints can be combined into a single operational tool. For anyone relying on anonymity or informant confidentiality, the combination of real-time tracking tags, predictive itinerary modeling and relationship graphs presents a new and formidable challenge.