China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

From The Register.com (Dec. 3, 2025):

China has embraced AI to help it censor and surveil its citizens and is exporting its techniques to the world, according to a new report by think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Titled “The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights” and published yesterday, the report observes that in Europe and the US the concept of “AI safety” is largely understood as making the technology safe and fair.

In China, the report says, the definition of AI safety is “ensuring that AI serves ‘core socialist values’ and the political stability of the state.”

The report says AI helps China to meet those goals in several ways, one of which is censoring large language models so they refuse to respond, omit sensitive details, or restate official narratives. ASPI tested four Chinese AIs – Baidu’s Ernie Bot, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu AI’s GLM and DeepSeek’s VL2 – using a dataset of images depicting the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the Tiananmen Square protests and related memorials, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, Falun Gong demonstrations, and eight other sensitive topics.

“Those tests show that Chinese-developed models display stronger censorship behaviours in response to politically sensitive imagery than their US-developed counterparts,” the report found. “The most direct censorship behaviour was an outright refusal to respond, which was especially common in models accessed using inference providers headquartered in Singapore rather than the US, where sensitive prompts frequently triggered error messages or blank outputs.”

ASPI thinks those non-responses matter because Chinese AI is becoming accessible and popular around the world.

“The threat lies less in overt propaganda than in quiet erasure, when the machine that describes reality begins deciding which parts of reality may be seen,” the report states.

Erasure is already happening online, because China has made it plain that its publishers and web giants should use AI to filter material on their platforms.

“In China, AI now performs much of the work of online censorship, scanning vast volumes of digital content, flagging potential violations and deleting banned material within seconds,” the report finds. China requires its web giants like Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance to develop AI to filter content, and those companies have productized their efforts and therefore become part of the AI-powered censorship apparatus.

The report notes that China’s censorship regime still needs human content reviewers, because AI can’t yet interpret satire, keep up with evolving idioms, or understand all minority languages.

China has therefore “effectively ‘deputized’ small and medium-sized enterprises, under the principle of ‘self-discipline’ (自律), to police their users on behalf of the authorities, thus showing how they adopt AI tools and train censorship workers in a system in which human judgement remains indispensable – for now.” [read more]

Big AI is watching China's citizens. 1984 part two. The ultimate in high-tech surveillance. I wonder if George Orwell could dream this up. He probably wouldn't be surprised though.

More tech used on its citizenry:

China’s sci-fi spherical Death Star-like robot cop uses AI, facial recognition to track criminals