Myanmar’s Digital Authoritarianism: Building a Surveillance State with Chinese Technology Transfers

Myanmar’s generals have just completed elections close to their 2021 coup’s five-year mark. In the lead-up to the polls (held in three phases from 28 December 2025 to 25 January 2026), security checks and digital scrutiny surged to become a daily reality. Authorities stopped people, searched, and ordered them to unlock their phones; this signals the regime’s intent for long-term power consolidation through data control rather than the vote.

The Myanmar military is now more capable of digital surveillance and control than at any point in its history. Their newest weapon is something not visible to many. The “Person Scrutinization and Monitoring System” (PSMS), a digital screening and tracking system, reportedly draws on Chinese-made artificial intelligence camera networks and feeds directly into a central watchlist. Human Rights Myanmar flagged this system’s emergence in 2024, describing it as a nationwide network of terminals installed at checkpoints, hotels and transport hubs, and wired into Myanmar’s identity registries.

The PSMS is just the tip of the iceberg of the system’s architecture. Since May 2022, Myanmar’s military authorities have been building a national database system that captures biometric and household information on an unprecedented scale. By late 2023, the regime declared that it had digitised over 52 million biometric identity records, nearly that of the entire population, and more than 13 million household-registration files — in essence, a near-universal population registry. Presented as an administrative upgrade, the rollout of biometric smart cards complete with fingerprint, iris and facial data has enabled the creation of a centralised identity system anchoring citizens across immigration, policing, hotel check-ins and local administration.

Telecommunications surveillance has expanded alongside the PSMS’ implementation. By 2023, the authorities had tightened enforcement of real-name SIM registration, which the National League for Democracy (NLD) government initiated in 2016. The national ID–linked SIM registration made financial transactions through mobile banking increasingly legible to the state during investigations. With every phone number checked against the same national e-ID database, a citizen’s phone is now an identity beacon, linking their movements and digital activity (through their usage of applications and social networks) to the state’s biometric registry. This ID-linked registration, combined with smart cards and PSMS, makes Myanmar’s telecommunications network a living map of the population.

Though still incomplete, Myanmar’s digital surveillance state already matters, as selective enforcement generates fear and self-restraint long before systems are fully integrated.

Much of this infrastructure is not homegrown. The procurement trail of Myanmar’s surveillance state points directly to Chinese suppliers. Reuters’ investigations have reported that Myanmar’s “Safe City” project, initiated by the NLD government and rapidly expanded after the 2021 coup, relied on China’s Huawei, Hikvision, and Dahua for AI-enabled facial recognition closed circuit television (CCTV), licence plate readers, and centralised monitoring software. Local intermediaries, such as Fisca Security & Communication and Naung Yoe Technologies, imported, installed and maintained surveillance hardware from these three largest public security and AI-surveillance manufacturers in China. Before 2021, Yangon had around 3,000 cameras in 1,000 locations. Since 2021, protesters have been arrested after authorities matched their faces against the database fromCCTV footage. Another key layer is a China-style national firewall, which was reportedly first piloted in mid-2022, to centralise state control over internet traffic and filtering. The regime then activated a deep packet inspection system with filtering tools from Chinese firms. These tools form the backbone of a firewall capable of censoring websites, monitoring encrypted communication through metadata and feeding suspicious patterns into the PSMS pipeline. With AI-enhanced cameras, real-name SIM identities and facial recognition feeding a central database, the state can identify, match and flag citizens before protests can even form. The regime has now consolidated its initial, scattered urban surveillance into its national database, integrating AI-enabled tools.

When the controversial Cybersecurity Law came into force in 2025, requiring platforms to retain user data and hand it over on demand, the PSMS began cross-checking ID numbers and SIM-linked profiles against a central database of “wanted” individuals.  The system reportedly flagged at least 1,657 people for arrest between March and May 2025. A local security specialist explained that these arrests appeared to have been supported by automated matches of names, numbers, and faces linked through the national database.

The military regime’s surveillance capacity is expanding faster than its governing capacity, however. The regime has moved on from old intelligence networks that once held the state together, towards imported digital systems. According to a local security industry insider, the system has yet to be fully integrated. The authorities still rely heavily on legal instruments, human intelligence and manually curated watchlists. Digital surveillance enforcement primarily targets some 50,000 individuals linked to political opposition, civil disobedience movements and resistance networks.

Though still incomplete, Myanmar’s digital surveillance state already matters, as selective enforcement generates fear and self-restraint long before systems are fully integrated.

Myanmar’s trajectory is not unique in Asia. Pakistan’s Chinese-built “Safe City” systems saturate major urban centres with facial recognition CCTV, while Cambodia seeks to integrate Chinese-style surveillance platforms into its security apparatus. Broadly, China’s public security model seems to have evolved into a portable template for countries seeking to expand their coercive reach, especially for governments confronting political uncertainty turning to technologies of control.

The Myanmar case highlights that digital authoritarianism today rests less on domestic institutional strengths than on the ability to import technical capacity from a willing seller. Rather than elections, the digital authoritarian practices emerging in Myanmar, powered by surveillance infrastructures, will determine the boundaries of political freedom in the years ahead.

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