In 2017 I did my final trip to China, Taiwan, and Vietnam to inspect dozens of factories and engineering support sites that were engineering and manufacturing pretty much all the tech devices the world uses. In one visit to FOXCONN (they make all the Apple iPhones and other devices), our team was given an IoT (‘Internet of Things’) demo in front of a wall of screens displaying various aspects of life. After 30 seconds of 10 of us standing and watching, the host explained they now had a record of who we were, what our phones we logged on to, who we were standing next to, what we recently bought, where we recently travelled to, what our eyes were looking at, etc. All of this with facial-recognition technology and pretty much open scanning of anyone’s mobile phone Bluetooth, WIFI, and cellular data. In addition to this, the host explained that all their workers were tracked with this system, including their ‘health status’, via a QR-code tracking app that they had to update. There was no specific health issue at the time, just a generic status that had to be updated and kept ‘green’ for ‘allowed’ and if ‘red’, they had to report to officials for some unexplained ‘correction’. Their pay and ability to purchase items was also tied to this status.
That was 2017, and now it is employed across a majority of China, via the system above, named the ‘Social credit system’. This adds/deducts points for social behavior, with the State controlling what adds or detracts to the score. Obey the State, keep your Health Status (vaccines) current, pay your taxes, say nothing bad about the government, and your score stays high, you get travel benefits (freedom of movement) and other perks that should be considered ‘normal’ rights in the West. Speak out against the State, jaywalk, miss your taxes, skip a vaccine, and you loose points, with the State deciding when you can redeem them. In the meantime, your movement (planes, trains, etc.) is limited as well as your bank access. Since millions already use their facial recognition to unlock their devices, facial recognition (even with a mask), is by default tied to your digital ID and therefore access to your digital wallet.
From Technocracy.news:
“China has been developing a “social score” system that has also created a dystopian nightmare where citizens can track each other on radar-style “lowlife” scanners. The nightmarish scheme blacklists “lazy” citizens who get into debt or spend their time playing video games in a creepy initiative that could have come straight out of Black Mirror.
The scheme was first unveiled in 2014 and has been trialed in cities and provinces each using their own system – tracking financial and social worth. Millions of people with low “social credit” have been banned from taking flights and planes because of the system. And then people with high credit get discounts, get shorter waiting times at government-run institutes and are more likely to get jobs. In China’s next five-year plan, which covers 2021 to 2025, the regime has set out its ambitions to step up people watching even more. It states: “We will also closely guard against, and a crackdown on, the infiltration, sabotage, subversion and separatist activities of hostile forces.”
From the head of the IMF: They calculated vaccines would add $9 trillion to the world economy. ‘This year, next year, vaccine policy is economic policy … without it we can not turn the fate of the world economy around …’ – Kristalina Georgieva, Head of the IMF, April 8, 2021
Similar to how the US co-opted left-wing movements in the 1960s and 1970s (CIA funding fringe leftists groups like the Black Panthers and others), they have now succeeded in co-opting ultra-woke ‘leftist’ groups into supporting the very things the left used to despise (corporations and corporate-government corruption).
Personal Notes on China based on visits for work 2006 to 2017:
I saw the digital ‘health’ passport system being trialed in the Shenzhen “SEZ” (Special Economic Zone) in 2017. Since then my mental notes to myself about how China was organized, or at least how they trialed the organizing, became much more clear, mainly due to the links between technocracy and the systems and behavior of people today under the transformation ‘spell’ of the pandemic respsonse.
These are small items in time starting in early 2000’s, that now seem to fit with the ideal technocratic societies desired by ‘them’.
- Early 2006 – initial trips. On one of my half-dozen work trips to Shenzhen SEZ. Ours was one of thousands of companies rushing to move any and all tech manufacturing into mainland China (we were actually quite late to the game starting only in 2001). Basically the early days of mobile phone and wireless device mass-production. Shenzhen (just north of Hong Kong) had grown from a small fishing town of under 200,000 people to above 4 or 5 million. The planned ‘Special Economic Zone’ around it had literal borders around it to keep population movements under control. You would be subjected to a minor security check to ensure you were an approved ‘professional’. Since we were Westerners our hosts said we would never be checked so long as we were there. My co-workers who were from China also came on some work trips. They explained all the workers in the factories were migrants brought in from the rural areas. They were repeating the official line that these workers were all previously poor criminals and that these low-paying factory jobs ($100 USD per month at the time) were the only way for them to survive. So I asked – ‘all these young people were poor criminals until they got these great factory jobs?’. ‘Well, no, I guess not all but that’s what the government tells us’.
Today in hindsight: At one of the entrance highways into the SEZ from the Hong Kong side, I always saw government signs such as this. ‘Empty talk endangers the nation, practical work brings prosperity’. Also in English probably to remind foreigners to know their place among this society.
- 2006 – 2008. On one factory visit, during our slow times, I was deep in to essays on Edward Bernays ‘Propaganda’, Carroll Quigley’s ‘Tragedy and Hope’, etc. The site I used and still use is https://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/. Within an hour of opening this site and reviewing, factory security was in our small visitors office. My host pointed to me to explain I was the one on the website. This show how fast a ‘flag’ can be set for visiting disinformation sites.
- General sense of planned societies. Any events involving leisure, fun, all have a planned feel to them in that only the government-sponsored events were allowed.
Final trip – 2017 to Shenzhen. I witnessed the majority of citizens scrambling around paying for everything via QR codes on their mobiles. My colleagues were impressed – ‘what a great system, eh!’ Later on, during a manager’s tour of FOXCONN (makers of iPhones and all other tech devices), we were treated to a demo of a giant media wall. This wall scanned our eyes, our phones (Bluetooth and WIFI), and the host revealed they now had our phone info, the info of people next to us, what we used our phones for, etc. They then showed us their own workers’ mobile app which included a ‘health status’, set to either red or green. The worker would have to report to an office if their status was red, even though there was no health issue specific at the time.
It may take years to move the rest of the Western nations on to such a system, but all aspects of this have been tested for years in China on hundreds of millions of citizens. The first major step for the West to somehow gauge uptake of the digital vaccine passport before moving to the digital ID. Again this is mainly aimed at ensure the young (under 30) are obedient, since they and their children will be the main economic drivers beyond the year 2030.