The Chinese regime’s delusional grip on its people has reached a new level with the widespread supply of connected pens to schoolchildren. Objective: Monitor their notes and homework.
Ever more networked, ever more monitored. Chinese students are given spy pens at the start of the school year. Equipped with a mini camera, they record students’ notes in real time and transmit them to their teacher.
Before its generalization in late August, the device was used for several years in certain primary and secondary facilities in Shanghai and Yunnan Province. In late July, Chinese online media Hongxing Xinwen, affiliated with Chengdu Shangbao newspaper, shed light on this new form of surveillance by sharing the testimony of a schoolgirl from Hainan, the country’s southernmost province. The young girl admits that she felt “observed” and “lost the happiness of her holiday” by this “smart pen” distributed by her teacher.
Download assignments and corrections
“Wherever they are, as soon as the students put their pen on a piece of paper, the content is transmitted to the teacher’s computer in real time via Bluetooth,” explains Xiandai Kuaibao, the Nanjing-based newspaper. Teachers know exactly how much time their students spend on homework, can download and correct their homework.
China’s Ministry of Education defends a measure to strengthen “homework management in schools”, saying that teachers “must encourage the scientific use of computer tools for analysis and homework diagnosis, when conditions permit”. Some local media have raised concerns. The editor of an editorial published by the Beijing newspaper Xin Jingbao fears that the widespread use of these pens will turn them into “a pair of intelligent handcuffs.”
GPS chip and face recognition
Surveillance systems based on the use of artificial intelligence have long since penetrated the borders of Chinese schools. Face recognition is therefore widely used on the school portal. In some classes, cameras or even helmets are used to measure brain activity to ensure children are paying attention to their teacher.
At the beginning of the 2021 school year, one of the schools in the southeast Chinese city of Zhuhai asked its students to integrate an electronic chip into their shirt collars. The measure, which claimed to increase their security, made it possible to collect information about their daily routes and whereabouts in the facility. Even more invasive: As part of a pilot project initiated in 2018, the classrooms of a high school in the city of Hangzhou were equipped with a facial recognition system designed to read students’ emotions. Scanned every 30 seconds, students were cataloged by the software as ‘happy’, ‘angry’, ‘confused’ or even ‘scared’.
The use of connected pens is another example of the extensive surveillance Beijing is imposing on its population. China has nearly half a billion surveillance cameras, or half the world’s inventory. Since 2014, the country has also been testing a “social credit” scheme aimed at rating citizens.