When a cybersecurity researcher going by the pseudonym NetAskari recently clicked on a tab labeled “Inquiries for journalist files” on an unsecured Chinese web dashboard, he expected to see a jumble of auto-generated fake data.
Instead, familiar faces appeared on the screen. It was a comprehensive database of almost every foreign journalist based in Beijing around 2021, including official passport photographs taken at entry/exit bureaus, private cellphone numbers, visa details and dates of birth. They also found their exact personal information lying dormant in this Chinese police watch list.
“It was more interesting than shocking,” Netaskari told DW. “When you work as a journalist in China, you basically take for granted that you’re always on their radar. But what surprised me was how easy it was to access this highly sensitive system.”
China’s granular system of social control
What NetAskari found is part of an emerging system of “holographic profiles” of modern China.
They had inadvertently gained access to a demonstration version of a remote tracking system designed for the public security bureau in Zhangjiakou, the city in Hebei province that hosts the 2022 Winter Olympics.
Although this was only a test panel, it was packed with real datasets that clearly outlined the trajectory of China’s state surveillance machine, which is rapidly evolving from a network of simple street cameras into a data-fused, 24/7, predictive social control behemoth.
For years, China has operated the world’s most extensive CCTV network. A massive initiative known as the “Xueliang” (Bright Eyes) project aims to merge these disparate islands of surveillance scattered across the country.
But data on the Zhangjiakou police dashboard shows detailed information with which officers can track a person.
The system no longer relies solely on police cameras installed on roadsides; For example, it accurately records the specific train carriage and seat number taken by the target when arriving from Beijing or Shanghai.
It even synchronizes photos taken by facial-recognition ticket gates at local ski resorts directly into its tracking mechanism. The movements of acquaintances of the researcher who had recently gone skiing in Zhangjiakou were precisely marked and mapped along detailed trajectories in the system.
“The idea is simply to process as much data as possible from as many sensors as possible in real time,” the researcher said.
The system logs daily behavior such as gasoline consumption, regular shopping locations and whether a person frequently visits “petition areas.”
This massive data-fusion effort seeks to tie together an individual’s physical whereabouts, consumption habits, and digital footprints into an impeccable “holistic personnel collection.”
tracking foreign journalists
Within this increasingly airtight net, foreigners – particularly journalists and other citizens of Western countries – are being paid more attention by authorities.
Statistics from the system’s “Smart Report” show that Chinese security agencies focus disproportionately on citizens of the “Five Eyes” countries, which include the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Deep in the backend, some foreign journalists have been assigned a special real-time tracking tag called “trackable”. The system can automatically trigger an early alert for police as soon as they step into a jurisdiction.
For independent journalism in China, this is an existential threat.
In the past, foreign journalists traveling to sensitive areas such as Xinjiang often relied on experience to see plainclothes police marching behind them. Now, algorithmic upgrades in the policing system make this traditional cat-and-mouse game obsolete.
“Now they don’t have to send two or three cars to chase you,” NetAskari said.
Because the system has access to your mobile payments, ticket purchases and social networks, officers can completely anticipate your itinerary, ensuring you can only see what they want you to see upon arrival.
If the data network finds you interacting with certain individuals, the police can easily call and intimidate your sources behind the scenes. In this completely closed surveillance loop, the concept of “under-the-radar investigations” is being systematically eliminated.
The system knows where you are
The system’s capability for group analysis and relationship modeling really transforms this monitoring.
Traditional tailgating requires excessive police resources. But modern “smart policing” attempts to visualize interpersonal interactions through algorithms.
At the core of the dashboard, the system automatically generates complex network graphs based on how often targets are captured on camera interacting, revealing who actually knows who, and how much time they spend together.
This technology has been in development for years. In 2019, Chinese tech giant Hisense filed a patent for a “composite relationship model for people involved in cases”, aimed at mapping travel, call records and vehicle usage. In 2025, the Shanghai Putuo Public Security Bureau awarded a $200,000 contract for a “composite personnel collection system”.
The high error rates and manpower constraints of previous manual monitoring methods are rapidly being replaced by cold, highly efficient and tirelessly automated algorithms.
Western democracies are also believed to be grappling with controversy over the misuse of surveillance technologies like Palantir.
But as researcher NetAskari points out, comparisons with China’s authoritarian system only go so far.
“In Western democracies, there are debates… In China, this debate doesn’t exist at all. The police and the Ministry of State Security do whatever they want with relatively little oversight.”
Whether it’s a foreign journalist wandering the narrow streets of Beijing for a story, or a regular tourist vacationing at a ski resort, everyone eventually merges into cold codes on a giant data dashboard.
NetAskari said that in this system people are limited to numbers, patterns and vector operations. They become “a ‘datamass’ that can be controlled, shaped and bound as required.”
Edited by: Wesley Rahn