How the export of China’s “digital authoritarianism” model enabled Iran’s crackdown on protestors, and contributed to the downfall of the country’s top regime figures.

By Probe International

The Iranian protests, which erupted on December 28, 2025, primarily triggered by a severe economic crisis, revealed the extent of Iran’s reliance on Chinese-supplied advanced surveillance and digital repression technologies to enable and intensify the suppression. 

Responding to the largely peaceful protests with extreme violence, authorities labeled protesters as “terrorists” to justify mass shootings, summary executions, torture, and widespread arrests, leading to a dramatically high death toll. Early reports (around mid-January 2026) cited 2,571 deaths (from groups such as the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, including protesters, security personnel, and others). Official Iranian statements acknowledged around 3,117 deaths, while independent estimates from human rights organizations, UN sources, activists, and media ranged much higher—often 5,000–7,000 verified, with some projections reaching 20,000–36,500 or more (including unverified cases and mass killings concentrated in early January peaks).

Various reports highlight the provision of tools by Chinese companies that mirror those used in China’s far-western Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region against Uyghurs—prominently Tiandy, as well as Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, and others.

These include “smart” cameras, facial recognition for identifying and tracking protesters, internet-filtering equipment, and elements including the BeiDou GPS system. This support stems from a decade-long security partnership between Iran and China, including police training, crowd control methods, and a shared “cyber sovereignty” model emphasizing state control over information and infrastructure.

Reports, such as one from the British organization Article 19, highlight how these technologies facilitated near-total nationwide internet shutdowns (starting around January 8, 2026), mobile network disruptions, and censorship, isolating Iran’s ~93 million citizens from the global internet. This obscured human rights violations, mass killings, and documentation of the violence unleashed on the citizens of Iran by the regime’s security forces. Despite U.S. sanctions (e.g., Tiandy added to the Entity List in 2022 for Xinjiang Uygur abuses and links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), these firms continued supplying equipment to Iranian security forces, military, and police, often through intermediaries.

The collaboration exemplifies the export of China’s “digital authoritarianism” or “stability maintenance” model to allied regimes, aiding Iran’s shift from traditional policing to tech-enabled comprehensive surveillance and control. Experts describe it as “exporting repression as a service,” raising alarms about its spread to other countries (e.g., Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and Pakistan).

The Iranian regime’s response to protests rooted in economic despair and long-standing demands for freedom exposed a dire escalation of repression enabled by Sino-Iranian technological ties, marking one of the bloodiest episodes in modern Iranian history. While Western nations and the UN condemned the brutality, expressed horror at the violence, and called for accountability and an end to killings, China publicly backed Iran’s “stability” and opposed foreign interference.

Despite Iran’s centralized digital repression infrastructures, an Israeli intelligence operation managed to compromise Tehran’s traffic cameras—utilized to enforce strict hijab laws—to facilitate the joint US-Israeli military strike that eliminated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28.

For Beijing, which has aggressively marketed its “stability maintenance” model to allied autocracies while deploying the world’s most extensive domestic surveillance apparatus to quash internal dissent, this serves as a cautionary tale: the same systems empowering control over populations could one day be turned inward or against the Chinese Communist Party itself. In exporting repression as a service, the CCP may ultimately sow the seeds of its own undoing.