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China-UK relations
BusinessChina Business

Eye of the beholder: Will security and human-rights concerns get Chinese camera makers Hikvision and Dahua banned in the UK?

  • A growing chorus is calling for a ban on the companies’ equipment for its purported use in surveillance in Xinjiang
  • A new public-procurement bill could pave the way for a ban on government purchases

Reading Time:7 minutes
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Three years after the US blacklisted both Hikvision and Dahua, pressure on the UK to take a deeper look at the Chinese camera makers is rising. Illustration: Perry Tse
Chad Brayin London

Much like China, surveillance cameras are a way of life in public spaces in Britain.

Widely found in schools, community centres and prisons, as well as on public transit, they act as silent deterrents and as tools for authorities looking to prevent or investigate illicit activity from minor theft to acts of terrorism.

London itself is famously one of the most surveilled cities in the world, with 73 closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras for every 1,000 people living in the British capital. Only Taiyuan in Shanxi Province in northern China and Wuxi in Jiangsu Province in eastern China have more cameras per capita, according to an analysis by security researcher Comparitech.
However, tensions are rising over the growing dominance in Britain of two of the world’s biggest manufacturers of internet-protocol cameras – Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Zhejiang Dahua Technology – and their purported involvement in China’s surveillance of ethnic Uygurs in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in northwest China.

01:22

US blacklists 28 Chinese entities over Xinjiang

US blacklists 28 Chinese entities over Xinjiang

“We shouldn’t be using companies that are complicit in genocide. That should not be allowable at all,” said Alicia Kearns, co-chair of the China Research Group and a Conservative member of Parliament. “On the other side of the coin, we are allowing China to build a tech totalitarian state and they’re going to build it on the backs of data from the people of Britain and other countries … We are essentially sending the facial and gait data of our children and people across the UK back to China and the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP.”

The pressure on the UK to take a deeper look at the Chinese camera makers comes nearly three years after the US blacklisted both Hikvision and Dahua.
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