But selling smart city solutions in China came with a catch – corporations would have to be complicit in the state’s large-scale surveillance efforts. American firm Cisco apparently didn’t mind. Its software was on display in Songdo, and subsequently packaged in the innocuous sounding ‘Peaceful Chongqing’ initiative. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2011:
The system, being built in the city of Chongqing over the next two to three years, is among the largest and most sophisticated video-surveillance projects of its kind in China, and perhaps the world. Dubbed ‘Peaceful Chongqing,’ it is planned to cover a half-million intersections, neighborhoods and parks over nearly 400 square miles, an area more than 25% larger than New York City. (Chao and Clark, 2011)
Cisco supplied the software for Peaceful Chongqing, but like most smart cities, the system involved a number of firms. For example, Chinese firm Hikvision supplied many of the surveillance cameras. In the following decade Hikvision significantly expanded its operations, and it now offers comprehensive security systems that include hardware and software to firms and governments in more than 150 countries (Hikvision, 2024). Hikvision is not alone, as many Chinese firms have participated in roughly 700 smart city initiatives across the country (Yue et al., 2024).
Many ofthese Chinese ‘hidden champions’ have become global competitors of their erstwhile American, South Korean and Japanese partners. This has provoked a fierce backlash, with critics pointing out that Chinese firms sell surveillance technology such as facial recognition systems that can be used by governments to monitor political opponents and activists (Atha et al., 2020). Emblematic of this coverage was a New York Times story that reported on Ecuador’s use of Chinese smart city technology (Mozur et al., 2019). It explained that a vast network of cameras fed images back to 16 monitoring centres and the country’s ‘feared domestic intelligence agency’. The system, known as ECU-911, was designed and installed by a tie-up between Huawei and the state-owned China National Electronics Import & Export Corporation. The story claimed that there were agreements in place to build similar systems in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Angola. Even more alarmist was an assessment of the operations of Chinese smart city firms in Africa, that concluded ‘[t]he consequences for human rights on the African continent are likely to be dire’ (Gravett, 2022).
State Platform Capitalism
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