The hope and hate around China’s Olympic tech

This Winter Olympics, should Chinese tech be celebrated or feared?

With the 2022 Winter Olympics just two days away, all eyes are on Beijing. The Olympic Games have always been an opportunity for host countries to brag about their strengths, and that’s especially appealing to China, which seeks to raise its cultural and political status whenever it can.

This is a moment for China to assert its image as a tech superpower. There’s no better stage than the Olympics for China to show off how it can revolutionize things that have stayed the same for decades.

• China clearly wants to upstage Japan and the Tokyo games in terms of bringing sci-fi robots to life. Robots are everywhere in the Olympic Village, mixing cocktails and shaming people into wearing masks .
• The highly adjustable, remote-controlled beds in the Olympic Village have also captured the imagination of foreign athletes and journalists .
• Beijing is labeling this Olympics as a “ Green Olympics ” (those snow-making technologies are allegedly carbon-neutral) and “the first Olympic Games on the cloud” (all event-related data is stored on Alibaba’s cloud infrastructure).
• It will be the first international test of China’s central bank digital currency, too. All vendors in the Olympic Village support eCNY payments, Beijing says , while popular mobile payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay cannot be used.

But could this backfire? After all, it’s the Chinese government’s tech-savviness that has made other countries wary: What if all these fancy technologies were used in surveillance and espionage?

• This is the kind of concern that prompted cybersecurity experts to look into the mobile app that every foreign individual needs to have installed to participate in the Olympics. Researchers and observers have debated how big a threat it really is.
• The Canadian research group Citizen Lab first reverse-engineered MY2022, an app required by China’s Olympics COVID-19 protocols, and sounded the alarm on a few security flaws .
• Then, independent researcher Jonathan Scott took the accusation to a much higher level and said the app is actively spying on users. His claims have since been retweeted by prominent figures like Joe Rogan and Josh Rogin.
• But the infosec community largely rejected Scott’s accusation as unsubstantiated claims or misinterpretations of the reverse-engineering software .
• Citizen Lab’s communications specialist Miles Kenyon told Protocol that, upon further inspection of a Jan. 28 version of MY2022, the loopholes it flagged had been fixed. But the group also lost access to an account on the app that’s needed for deeper analysis.

And broader skepticism toward Chinese tech remains, even if the debate over this app is settled. Governments can’t help but worry about other apps and technologies with ties to the Chinese government that could compromise the security and privacy of Olympic contenders.

• The U.S. , U.K. and Netherlands have advised their athletes to bring only a burner phone to the event in order to prevent any information leaks.

Ultimately, the Winter Olympics is just going to be one more opportunity for opposing sides to build their own narratives about China’s status as a tech superpower.

— Zeyi Yang ( email | twitter )

What will be 'informatized' first?

If you don’t have hours to read through China’s recently released “ Five-Year Plan for Informatization ,” a detailed blueprint for what will be “informatized” in the country, we’ve got you. Protocol tracked mentions of key sectors and technologies in the document using DigiChina’s translation , and the Central Commission for Network Security and Informatization, the author of the plan, clearly anticipates AI, 5G and (to a lesser extent) blockchain to change the way people use and access information. Given the twin crises of aging and the pandemic, it’s no surprise that health care, especially for the elderly, is also a priority sector. And creating “cybersecurity defense lines” is high on Beijing’s list, too.

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One more thing

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