Once upon a time, long before the Covid-19 lockdowns, the West pretended to be concerned about things such as freedom, the right to privacy, and the dangers of surveillance and data harvesting from its citizens. China's surveillance police state was, at least publicly, mostly described as an abomination that threatened human rights -- not an example to emulate.
Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case. For years, in the name of environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, safety and convenience, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), led by Klaus Schwab, have been promoting global surveillance in the form of so-called "smart cities." In China, already by 2018, there were more than 500 smart cities in place.
During Covid-19, the UN and the WEF came up with a slogan: "Build back better" – recycled by then US President Joe Biden. Countless national leaders, like little programmed UN/WEF bots, endlessly repeated the slogan, while most unsuspecting citizens had no idea what it meant. National leaders began thanking the Covid-19 pandemic for offering a once-in-a-lifetime "opportunity to build back better" from the destruction that their very own Covid-19 policies – notably the lockdowns – had wrought. Biden introduced a trillion dollar Build Back Better Plan, having as one of its highest priorities, "the fight against climate change," through building "smart infrastructure."
The WEF, far from hiding its communist aspirations, argued in a paper that capitalism itself would have to be "reinvented." As is common knowledge, Schwab appears to be a great admirer of the Chinese Communist state, which he praised in 2022 as a "model" to emulate. "I think we should be very careful in imposing systems. But the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries," Schwab said on Chinese state television.
The way to "build back better", according to the UN and the WEF, is to establish "smart cities":
"More than 90 per cent of COVID-19 cases have been occurring in urban areas that have become the epicenter of the pandemic... Now is our chance to recover better, by building more resilient, inclusive and sustainable cities. Innovations and technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) or artificial intelligence (AI) provide the possibility of upgrading urban services and achieving greater administrative efficiency. The concept of 'smart cities', which can help stimulate inclusive growth, promote social inclusion, decrease traffic congestion, combat crimes, improve resilience during natural disasters and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has a potential as a solution to urban problems both in developing and developed countries."
Schwab likened "climate change" to Covid 19, even calling it a "virus" in December 2024:
"So is an awareness now, generally, it's generally accepted that, climate change, if we do not tackle it, could be the next big, let's say virus, with much more damaging and long term consequences, compared to COVID 19."
On paper, the smart city is usually promoted as a techno-utopian blessing. National Geographic, in a text for children, defines it this way:
"A smart city, then, is a city in which a suite of sensors (typically hundreds or thousands) is deployed to collect electronic data from and about people and infrastructure so as to improve efficiency and quality of life. Residents and city workers, in turn, may be provided with apps that allow them to access city services, receive and issue reports of outages, accidents, and crimes, pay taxes, fees, and the like. In the smart city, energy efficiency and sustainability are emphasized."
In reality, the purpose of the smart city, as seen by its widespread use in China, has little to do with improving quality of life. Instead, it is overwhelmingly about state surveillance, followed by total monitoring and control of the inhabitants and the uninhibited extraction of their data for its system of social credits. According to MIT Technology Review:
"The government seems to believe that all these problems are loosely tied to a lack of trust, and that building trust requires a one-size-fits-all solution. So just as financial credit scoring helps assess a person's creditworthiness, it thinks, some form of 'social credit' can help people assess others' trustworthiness in other respects."
National Geographic's propaganda about the benefits of smart cities spookily echoes how Chinese Communists promoted the smart city when it was still in its infancy. Mayor Chen Xinfa of Karamay, a city in Xinjiang, said in 2012:
"Information technology is not just about technology. It should be integrated with all aspects of life in our city and make people's lives more convenient. The 'smart city' could also alert city leaders like me to what needs to be done urgently regarding city management or emergencies. For Karamay, it's not the future, but what's happening now,"
Xinjiang is an "autonomous region" in China where ethnic Uyghurs were among the first in the country to be monitored with surveillance and facial recognition technology 24/7.
Smart cities, in fact, are a Chinese Communist idea, established by the Chinese government in its 12th Five-Year Plan, issued in 2011.
In China, smart cities have been purposely developed into terrifying tyrannical nightmares. In many cities, including Shanghai and Hangzhou, every district has a data-hub, known as a so-called "City Brain," that monitors and stores unbelievable amounts of information about all citizens. The data is gathered by millions and millions of surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, aided by artificial intelligence. They all feed in the smallest details, such as whether a construction worker is wearing his helmet on the job, wrongful disposal of garbage and other minute offenses. Police patrols access the monitoring systems through a mobile app, to enable them to act immediately against any offenses of the law.
This same "smart" system is being advanced everywhere in China. According to Deutsche Welle, "Chinese state media boasts that police can identify every single person on the street in just one second." Chinese citizens are monitored throughout every step of their daily lives, even when entering their own apartment buildings: During lockdowns, police could immediately respond to anyone who dared defy the prohibition against going outdoors.
Offenses lead a citizen to receive a low social credit score, which in turn can lead to blacklisting from traveling on airplanes and high-speed trains, a ban on leaving the country, denial of access to services and even being barred from renting an apartment. This is the Chinese system which Schwab so openly admires.
These totalitarian, horrifying aspects of smart cities, which Schwab and the WEF globalists appear so to admire, and their origin, are rarely, if ever, mentioned in mainstream media descriptions of the concept. According to a 2024 World Population Review article:
"With the growing urban population around the world, smart cities and their technology allow governments to monitor and improve the financial, social and environmental aspects of life for its residents and visitors, making life more enjoyable, efficient, and sustainable. Public and private companies and federal, state, and city governments are working together to make smart cities possible.
"Smart cities started in Europe with early adopters being Barcelona and Amsterdam... In the United States, San Francisco, Atlanta, New York City, Miami, Denver, Boston, Columbus, Chicago, and Kansas City were among the first US smart cities."
No mention of China and its more than 500 smart cities, because that might make people start questioning the plan. Better to pretend that it is a European concept.
Mobile Magazine, in 2023, falsely claimed that "the top 10 smart cities setting the pace of global innovation" are located in Europe, followed by the US, and that "there are currently more than 140 smart cities across the world" -- completely omitting any mention of China and its more than 500 smart cities.
Back in 2014, when public debate on the issue still included criticism of Chinese smart cities, the US-China Business Council wrote:
"More ominously, such systems offer an unprecedented level of surveillance and control of public spaces, and a means to assemble a tremendous amount of data on individual citizens. Worldwide, cities are still in the early stages of understanding and managing the capabilities these systems can provide, and smart city technology companies have also not been as proactive as they could be in addressing privacy and data security issues. In China, there has been little or no public discussion of this facet of the smart city vision, and some international companies, such as Cisco, have been criticized in their home markets for supplying China with surveillance technology."
Today, apparently, nobody worries about surveillance technology. It is all part of the "new normal" or in the words of the WEF: "The Great Reset."
"The COVID-19 crisis has shown us that our old systems are not fit any more for the 21st century," said Schwab in 2020. "In short, we need a great reset."
According to the WEF – and, oddly, billionaire King Charles, who was the WEF's partner in launching this effort – we need a "better form of capitalism" and for that the WEF is bringing "the world's best minds together to seek a better, fairer, greener, healthier planet as we rebuild from the pandemic."
The WEF's role in driving smart cities globally is key. The WEF, for instance, despite being elected by nobody, leads the 2022 G-20 smart cities initiative, which it describes as follows:
"Led by the World Economic Forum, the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance on Technology Governance is the largest global initiative aiming at ensuring responsible and ethical use of smart city technologies.
"It is developing, testing, and implementing global standards and policies to ensure that data collected in public places is used safely and ethically, mitigate potential risks and foster public trust."
But who is watching the watchers? The entire concept is based on the fox watching the henhouse.
The unelected Schwab also holds a prominent seat at the G20 meetings for reasons that are entirely unclear but might be because, back in the day, several of the leaders of G20 countries were put through his Young Global Leaders program. Schwab famously bragged in a 2017 interview that the WEF was penetrating the political leadership of nation-states:
"What we are very proud of now, the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, that we penetrate to cabinets. So yesterday, I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of his cabinet or even more than half of his cabinet are... actually our young global leaders of the World Economic Forum."
Other Young Global Leaders graduates include French President Emmanuel Macron, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, former Prime Minister of Ireland Leo Varadkar, former Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, numerous government ministers from around the world, European royalty, and business and cultural leaders.
Schwab has made it clear that he and his political and business cohorts have a grim, all-encompassing grip in store for the free world – total surveillance, total control.
Schwab's own yearly Davos meetings, in which the world's political, business and cultural elites hold secret meetings about the future of the world without facing any critical questions, are -- obviously -- not subject to any form of transparency. The WEF is apparently so fearful of criticism and transparency that it has turned off comments on its own X account.
Elected leaders, ostensibly in Davos to take care of "we the people's" interests, continue to worship at Schwab's altar nevertheless. They flock to his annual January meeting there, presumably in the hope that they, the anointed, will be the chosen to be the rulers in his elite global politburo.
Perhaps they, like Schwab, want total control. If anything, the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic by world leaders, especially those in the West, proved beyond any doubt that they were salivating to adopt the Chinese Communist Party's values in a heartbeat: extreme lockdowns, closing "small" people's businesses while allowing "big box stores" to open, preventing children from going to school, controlling people's access to public and private spaces, monitoring their movements, fining them for "violating" lockdowns, enforcing mask mandates and making vaccines mandatory. Some countries, such as Australia, even put people suspected of having Covid-19 into quarantine camps. When some of them, who had tested negative for Covid-19 the day before, tried to escape, they were arrested at a nearby police checkpoint that had been set up for that purpose.
All these fundamentally totalitarian measures were adopted by so-called democratic leaders in the name of "health."
Imagine what they will be willing to adopt -- on your behalf, of course -- in the name of "climate."
Robert Williams is based in the United States.
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