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The Philippines
This Week in AsiaEconomics

Big brother Huawei kitted out this Philippine city. Is China watching?

  • Huawei’s state of the art surveillance systems at the Philippines’ ‘Bonifacio Global City’ spark paranoia that a Chinese big brother is watching
  • But the driving force behind the use of Chinese technology could be private sector greed rather than a sinister, snooping state

Reading Time:6 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Huawei: to some, worthy of suspicion. Photo: EPA
Ben O'RourkeandGigi Choy

Walking along tree-lined roads past the shiny buildings of Bonifacio Global City, you could be fooled into thinking you were in Singapore, until you realise it is impossible to find a roti prata stall. The district is smack in the middle of Metro Manila but is a pedestrian-friendly oasis in the hectic Philippine capital.

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BGC is a business and residential district that used to be known as The Fort. It was Fort Bonifacio, headquarters of the Philippine army and before that, Fort McKinley, built in the 1900s by the American colonial rulers. Besides the famous fort and numerous shopping centres, bars and restaurants, BGC is broken up by green spaces, is close to a few golf courses and has relatively easy access to the airport – many of the ingredients for a perfect executive playground.

 
It has also been equipped with state of the art mass-surveillance systems, developed by Chinese technology giant Huawei. Cameras linked to data collection tools, like number plate recognition, detect crimes and manage the flow of traffic. They are coordinated from a “central command centre” and “monitoring points” throughout the neighbourhood, which after “phase 2” of its development, could view 70 per cent of public areas. “Phase 3” was expected to take that to 100 per cent and would include cameras in all buildings and car parks.
Facial recognition software on show at the Security China 2018 exhibition. Photo: Reuters
Facial recognition software on show at the Security China 2018 exhibition. Photo: Reuters
The company upgraded analogue cameras to HD digital, increased storage so surveillance videos could be kept longer and improved the local network so it was quicker to transfer the footage, areas Huawei’s website said “severely hampered law enforcement and crime prevention efforts” under the previous set-up. This was done at the request of a local management company, Bonifacio Global City Estate Association, in 2014.

This “safe city”, as Huawei describes BGC on its website, will hopefully be a model for other cities to emulate, BGCEA executive director Rodney Medrano is quoted as saying in online marketing materials.

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As well as local giant Globe, BGC has attracted multinationals including Coca-Cola, HSBC, Unilever, Google and Facebook. Property agency Jones Lang LaSalle told ABS-CBN in 2013 that companies began moving there because rents are comparable to the traditional finance hub of Makati and “the environment is beautiful”.

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