AI to power China’s policing future – and VPN and Telegram users are at risk

• Chinese police are preparing to monitor VPN and Telegram users with AI-powered tools
• AI technology was a key element at the largest policing tech expo held in Beijing last May
• People in China cannot access Telegram, the most popular social media app, and international news sites without a VPN

When considering the future of policing, China reserves the spotlight for AI-powered surveillance – and VPN and Telegram users are among the targets.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, AI technology was the key element throughout the 12th China International Exhibition on Police Equipment, the largest policing tech expo held in Beijing last May.

Alongside DeepSeek-inspired LLM models that support criminal investigations and identify high-risk individuals, two tools are set to make the lives of millions of Chinese people who regularly use the best VPNs even harder.

China's AI crackdown to online dissent and censorship

While it's difficult to estimate the number of people using a virtual private network (VPN) in China, we do know that the tool is crucial for accessing the likes of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, as well as international and independent news sites – the South China Morning Post included.

As Freedom House wrote in its latest report, "Chinese internet users have faced the world’s worst conditions for internet freedom for a decade."

Severe legal repercussions for online activities and strict censorship, the report explains, are complemented by the work of authorities restricting access to anticensorship tools like VPNs.

Today, only a handful of VPN services for China function under these adverse conditions. Despite this, however, China's law enforcement seeks to become even more effective at blocking them.

This is, at least, what a technology company from Nanjing, a city in Eastern China, plans to do. During the event, the firm "showcased a tool capable of detecting such use [of VPNs]," the South China Morning Post reported.

Most of the people using a VPN are likely to do so to access Telegram, among other things. The popular messaging app and its official website have been blocked since 2015 in China, following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on its servers.

If you cannot prevent it, you can control it, right? This is what the Third Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security – the country's top police body – proposed to do with its new tools that, they say, can monitor Telegram.

This surveillance software is said to be able to monitor all Telegram accounts with Chinese mobile phone numbers, as these include strict real-name requirements.

"To date, the tool has collected more than 30 billion messages and monitored 70 million Telegram accounts, as well as 390,000 public channels and groups," said the group, as per the South China Morning Post.

Most crucially, however, this tool also seeks to target online dissent by scanning all Telegram messages related to politics and Hong Kong.

"The Institute cited the widespread use of Telegram by anti-government protesters in Hong Kong in 2019 as one of the reasons for developing the tool," wrote the South China Morning Post.

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