When it comes to spying on its own people, China has revealed a surprising -- and daunting -- competence. Few in Beijing paid much attention to the cameras mounted on lampposts, rooftops and entryways along streets foreigners frequent. The SCOOT system, made by a British firm and purchased partly with development aid, was purportedly installed as part of a traffic-control system to count vehicles. The cameras were also secretly counting contacts between foreigners and Chinese, as John Pomfret, the A.P. correspondent expelled last week, found out. The Beijing State Security Bureau documented its charges against him with, among other evidence, photos of Pomfret and a source sitting * in his car outside a Beijing hotel; apparently the pictures were taken from a rooftop across the street.
The automatic cameras possess night vision, which enabled them to record the bloody fighting along the major streets leading to Tiananmen Square. That sharp footage, skillfully edited and played repeatedly on state-run China Central Television, shows only aggressive "counterrevolutionary" demonstrators attacking impassive soldiers. Zooming in on individual faces in the crowd, the editors created televised WANTED posters, complete with telephone numbers for viewers to call to report on the students frozen on the screen.
Even more startling was footage from a remote-control camera concealed in the dining room of a Beijing hotel, which was aired with a voice-over implying that the students at the table had been feasting when they were supposed to be fasting. Decipherable dates on the clip showed, however, that the dinner actually took place more than a week after their hunger strike ended. But the Chinese got the point: nothing is secret.
Beijing's agents shocked the West by "stealing" raw footage of a man-on- the-street interview that ABC News had transmitted by satellite to the U.S. Executives at ABC said they did not know how the Chinese obtained the interview, but conceded that surveillance experts could have intercepted the network's original satellite transmission. ABC's feeds are now scrambled.
Once lulled by the cuddly Communism of Deng Xiaoping, foreigners now take seriously the tales of wall-to-wall surveillance. In addition to telephone taps, the apartments (notably bedrooms), offices and cars of foreigners are bugged for sound and outfitted with tiny optical-filament cameras. Chinese security assured one foreign intelligence officer that the accumulation of tapes in a variety of languages was no problem: the agency has plenty of fellow travelers to deliver sophisticated, nuanced translations.