Geospatial and China

They have been playing the long game and winning

I am very glad we shot down the Chinese spy balloon. It got me thinking again about China and its multiyear plan to digitize and model the world using geospatial technology.

Here is what I know about China's geospatial and GIS programs.

1. Chinese government stole the ESRI source code and classified maps in the early 2000s. After the breach, security did not change. The Director of Development thought it was too cumbersome. The Director in charge of security is Don Berry (Batman). And yes, he is still at ESRI bullying and mismanaging.

2. China built a geospatial database of the world. The Chinese 5-year plans have included automating, stealing, downloading, buying, surveillance, and any other means to build a Geographic Information System (GIS) of the entire planet. For GIS experts, you know that this is more than just maps. It is connectivity, attributes, coordinates, and more. It is ownership data, infrastructure connectivity, military activities, mining operations, transportation networks, social media geolocations, and more. They are or have gathered everything they can that is tied to geography. How did they pick the path of the balloon? Where are they buying land? They have the best model of our planet. A global digital twin. Just think about what that means.

3. The leading GIS vendor sees China as a profit center. ESRI has a variety of companies in China. At least one is focused on building technology just for China.

   1. ESRI China is effectively rebranded as a Chinese solution called GeoScene. ESRI China was “Reorganized as Yizhirui (China) Information Technology Co., Ltd. to provide more localized services and localized products for Chinese GIS users.” Yizhirui China (Beijing) Holdings Co., Ltd. is the alternative name for ESRI China (Beijing) Holding Co., Limited.

   2. Last year “Esri China” announced support for China’s operating system developed for the military Galaxy Kylin. “Galaxy Kylin, is an open-source server operating system developed by the National University of Defense Technology of China.”

   3. ESRI's R&D center for China is very active. The director is Moxie Zhang, a Chinese national. They began hiring Chinese developers rapidly in 2011.

   4. ESRI hires Chinese nationals regularly at their Redlands headquarters. This a reminder that there is a US government SCIF on the ESRI campus again “secured” by Don Berry (batman).

   5. The ESRI China website is not available.

4. Please secure your data if you are using any ESRI products (especially governments, infrastructure, mining, petroleum, insurance, and agricultural organizations). It is best practice and the security at ESRI is not robust.

The stakes cannot be higher for the free world. China is using GIS to organize and model ALL of our spatial data. The latest incident with the spy balloon is just a tiny piece of the whole effort. This is NOT just a US issue. Look at South America and Africa as examples of Chinese activities.