Big Brother gets new powers in China with digital ID system
China is launching a digital ID system, giving Beijing greater control over online activity and further raising concerns about surveillance and censorship.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/15/china-digital-id-internet-surveillance/
A woman uses her phone on May 7 by the People's Bank of China headquarters in Beijing. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)
China has long mastered what was once considered impossible: Completely controlling the internet within its borders. On Tuesday, Beijing will take another step toward centralizing its power over the web, introducing a government-run digital ID system that will enable it to even more closely censor and surveil the country’s 1 billion internet users.
China has enforced a “real-name registration” system for over a decade, meaning that Chinese internet companies almost always know the true identity of users who are, say, ordering a dress online, leaving a social media comment or playing a video game.
With the new centralized ID system, the Chinese government will take over the process. Users who submit a trove of personal information — including scans of their faces — will receive a unique code to access online accounts.
This means that companies, like social media site Weibo or online shopping behemoth Alibaba, will no longer be able to see the personal information of their users with digital IDs — but Chinese authorities will be able to see the real identity behind online accounts across a range of sites.
Although voluntary, experts fear it may not remain so — or that it will become so widely required as to make it effectively compulsory.
“It’s hard to look at steps like these and not see an intention to make people not feel anonymous,” said Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at Boston’s Northeastern University who co-wrote a recent report on China’s online censorship system.
“They want the policeman to be in your head, and a really important way of making people feel that policeman in their head is removing any illusion that someone might have that they’re anonymous,” she added.
The rules for the policy, which was proposed last year, were announced in May by six government departments — including China’s domestic security agency, which incorporates the police force, and its internet regulator.
They justified the change on data privacy grounds, saying the ID will better protect individuals’ sensitive information from social media companies, data leaks and fraudsters.
China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency last month described the system as a “protective shield” that “allows the public to truly feel ‘security is within reach’ while enjoying convenience.”
James Gong, a data protection lawyer based in Hong Kong, said issues like telephone fraud and data leaks are common in China, leading many people to be defrauded or scammed. This system, he said, may “reduce the opportunities of third parties getting hold of your personal information.”
Critics, however, say the system will lead to centralization of data in the hands of the Chinese government, which already enjoys access to reams of personal information about its citizens. Beijing may more easily find all of the digital accounts registered by one person, experts say, though the ID probably does not provide access to the activity, or browsing history, of those accounts.
“I understand that, functionally, they can get [information on online activity] now,” said Jessica Batke, a senior investigations editor at the online magazine ChinaFile who wrote the report on Chinese censorship with Edelson. “But anytime that you’re pushing that sort of information into one centralized place that the government has direct access to, I do think it represents an important change.”
Experts are also concerned that the system could make it easier for Beijing to enforce “digital exile,” where individuals are locked out of the online apps and services required for many daily activities in China, including paying for lunch, taking the subway or communicating with co-workers.
Nguyen Phong Hoang, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia in Canada who has studied the Great Firewall, said the digital ID could also pave the way for more personalized censorship, in which Beijing could ban content for specific people or populations in China.
“If this is successfully rolled out, we may reach a point where censorship happens at the personal level,” he said. “The granularity of control could increase dramatically.”
Digital IDs may even increase the risk of data breaches or hacks — despite the stated goal of the program — if China does not invest enough resources in protecting the personal data it collects for the system, Hoang said.
“They need to invest significant effort in securing the system and ensuring that the data is handled responsibly,” he said. “If an adversarial actor tries to access the personal data of Chinese citizens, the consequences could be severe — so the database must be well protected.”
There is precedent for this concern: In 2022, hackers claimed they had breached a Shanghai police database with personal data on more than 1 billion people, and they offered it for sale on the internet.
The ID policy has yielded pushback in China. Some have slammed the system as government overreach — including a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, Lao Dongyan, who criticized it as an attempt to monitor all online activity in a post that was later censored. Others, however, have praised the government’s attempt to protect netizens’ personal information.
Deng Yufeng, an artist whose work has focused on China’s surveillance state, summed up this dichotomy: “I think on one hand … it is definitely a positive development, and on the other hand, it can definitely strengthen government control,” he said.
“Digital IDs will add a layer of ‘protection net’ to people’s online privacy,” Deng said from Beijing. “There is nothing wrong with technology itself, but how the people behind the technology are supervised — the supporting supervision system, the accountability mechanism for leaks and the protection of users’ rights.”
Jeremy Daum, senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said the change is incremental given that the long-standing real-name registration system already eliminated the possibility of anonymity and the Chinese government can probably already obtain any information it wants on online activity.
“I think internet anonymity is critically important, but China hasn’t had it for a long time,” he said. “That ship has sailed.”
Still, the digital ID system does reflect the ever-adapting nature of China’s censorship and surveillance system.
Batke likens the system to “controlling the flows of water. … It allows water to flow in when necessary, stop it when necessary; it can adjust if there’s too much or too little,” she said.
New cyber policies in China, like the digital ID system, she said, are part of a broader, more ambitious national project.
“They’re really trying to change the information landscape that people have access to — to change what they know, and therefore eventually what they think, and eventually make the information landscape safe for the CCP,” she said, using the abbreviation for the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.