The big winner in Iran? Chinese repression

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49398493

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In the blink of an eye, the latest Iranian uprising has folded. For a few feverish days in January the talk was of imminent regime change, of not-so-supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei packing his bags. Then came the shoot-to-kill orders, the 16,000 or more body bags and the silence of the graveyard. Donald Trump’s cavalry did not ride to the rescue.

And the winner of this bloody, uneven contest? China’s digital repression model, duly adopted by Iran’s hardcore Revolutionary Guards, which ensured that the January protests were snuffed out even more quickly than the 2022 hijab demonstrations and the November 2019 rebellion against petrol price hikes. This time the uprising was nationwide, spread across 207 cities and towns according to the National Council of Resistance, drawing in all classes against apparently enfeebled leaders who had recently been handed a humiliating defeat with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.

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To the delight of the so-called Illiberal International (star members: China, Russia, North Korea), the regime has been saved by what could be dubbed the Dragon-Mullah axis. In 2021 Beijing and Tehran signed up to a 25-year tech and security deal designed to refine Iran’s ability to control its rising Gen Z population. That meant the mass transfer of surveillance technology — smart Chinese-made CCTV cameras have now been installed across cities and towns — and cybersecurity tools.

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That is the kind of intelligence being fed into the Iranian machine. It probably works better in China, where huge amounts of stored personal data feed into a complex system of behavioural modification. The Iranian regime does not have that kind of number-crunching capacity. But the regular exchanges between the Iranian police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan and the Chinese minister for public security Wang Xiaohong show how anxious Tehran has been to soak up information from the brand leader. Their last meeting was in December, just weeks before the Iran protests kicked off.

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A large part of this collaboration is about understanding the networks of protest, how they communicate, who is leading whom to what target. That has been part of the curriculum on the Advanced Police Officers Training Programme at China’s People’s Public Security University; Iranian practitioners, usually Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, take part in role-play exercises. When they return home, they get promoted quickly and presumably lobby hard for the kind of Chinese technology needed to carry out the mission. Not just facial recognition cameras but also AI systems that flag up ethnic and demographic groupings. Some of the Chinese techniques — filtering supposedly suspicious internet content — were applied by Tehran long before the two countries signed a security pact.

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The command of police state-enabling tech is at the heart of Xi Jinping’s Global Security Initiative, set up in 2022. It offers to help governments to combat crime — what’s not to like? — but also to stay in power by tracking subversive critics. Xi has even summoned a global security forum which he would like to be the Illiberal International’s answer to the West-affirming Munich Security Conference. The Chinese offer: values-free security diplomacy. Imagine the deals that could be struck there.

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Technical ingenuity, of course, does not remove the causes of unrest. Only good governance can tackle the misery of drought, only sound economics can restore investor confidence, only statesmanship can bring Iran to the rational conclusion that building nuclear weapons condemns the region to permanent insecurity. In the absence of these qualities, the floundering theocratic regime has to depend on the repressive toolkit offered by China. The Iranians deserve better.