Global Secure Information Exchange System

The Global Secure Information Exchange System (GSIXS, written and pronounced as G6), known as mìngyùn (命运, destiny) in China, is an international network for biosurveillance, health informatics, and implantable medical devices (IMDs). Owned by Zhupao and administered by the United Nations (UN), G6 was developed in 2040 as part of a China-led multilateral response to the CMD pandemic.

G6 operates worldwide under a World Health Organisation (WHO) charter, which limits the network’s functionality to what is strictly required for the purposes of biosurveillance. Data is mined uniformly and stored by G6 so it can be shared in the event of a global alert issued by the WHO. Zhupao offers additional G6 services to clients in a platform model, with custom licensing tiers for data sharing plans between individual countries.

Though credited with a central role in the mitigation of biorisk, the role of G6 in society continues to be a contentious issue in global politics and has raised discussions by academic and human rights organisations, corporations, small governments, and religious groups.

HistoryPermalink

First designPermalink

On February 23rd 2040, former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping announced that the third plenary session of the 17th National People’s Congress (NPC) would convene earlier to discuss an overhaul of China‘s healthcare system in response to the CMD pandemic. ^[1] The overhaul, which Xi dubbed mìngyùn in his announcement speech, involved bringing together China’s public and private healthcare sectors on a single platform developed primarily by Huawei and the China Electronics Technology Corporation (CETC). This is generally considered to be the first iteration of G6 as an intersectoral healthcare network meant to provide mainland China with standardised practices and applications for biosurveillance and health informatics.

In the same speech, Xi also announced that the CCP was in the final negotiating stages with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to adopt its contact tracing strategy, which involved the distribution of medical colloids supplied by Zhupao to accurately track the spread of Cariappa-Muren disease (CMD). CCP representatives had been stalling the negotiations due to their insistence that Huawei’s implantable multielectrode arrays (MEAs) be used for tracing efforts in China instead of Zhupao’s colloids, with the reasoning that Huawei’s MEAs were already being introduced to national sectors reliant on recording and stimulating neural activity as early as November 2037.

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On March 21st 2040, the CCP welcomed then-WHO Director-General Yang Jinglei and Sunil Cariappa to China, stating that they had been invited to bring their experience in the fight against CMD to bear on the development of mìngyùn and the distribution of Huawei’s implantable MEAs. In April 2040, Xu Shaoyong accused the CCP of misleading Cariappa and dismissed mìngyùn as an attempt to “present China’s surveillance apparatus inside the wrapping of a necessary tool for biosecurity, as both disciplines involve the intimate tracking and profiling of people.” ^[2]

On April 10th 2040, a leaked set of procurement notices filed by Huawei and the CETC revealed that the Social Credit System (SCS) and the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) were being merged with mìngyùn under the CCP’s “one person, one file” directive, proving Xu’s claims. Amidst widespread protests and accusations that the CCP was planning to “extend its brutal hold over Xinjiang to all of China under cover of the pandemic,” development on mìngyùn was halted on April 12th 2040.

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The project was resumed on May 3rd 2040 when the CCP entered into a cooperation strategy with the WHO to “strengthen the national healthcare system, ensure that quality health services are delivered to the people, and enrich China’s contribution to global health and biosurveillance.” ^[3] This strategy included a partnership between Zhupao and the National Health Commission (NHC) to redevelop China’s healthcare system using Zhupao’s IT infrastructure and colloid designs.

On May 7th 2040, G6 was officially unveiled during a Zhupao conference as “a new WHO-endorsed standard for biosurveillance, health informatics, and implantable medical devices (IMDs),” with Xu naming Efua Amankwah-Crouse, Cariappa, and Spencer Hagen as the team leads of the project. After the first version of G6 was finalised in September 2040, the CCP announced a series of pilot programmes to test G6 in the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Zhejiang.

On September 23rd 2040, Zhupao held a conference to unveil the colloids that were being administered to Chinese citizens as part of the pilot programmes. After injecting one of the colloids himself, Xu explained that they supported both CMD-specific diagnostic sensors and a means of neurometric identification developed by Sanial. ^[4] Xu also announced a set of G6 trials in cooperation with select state and private hospitals in Canada, London City, and Sri Lanka.

On October 31st 2040, the CCP declared the pilot programmes a success and announced its intention to introduce G6 to all its territories and special economic zones (SEZs) under the mìngyùn name.

International rolloutPermalink

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In November 2040, China requested an emergency special session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to propose “the international adoption of mìngyùn as a united front against CMD and its spread.” After six sittings, the UNGA adopted Resolution ES-13/6 on February 11th 2041, advocating for “the establishing of a worldwide standardised biosurveillance system to guard against infectious disease threats.”

In March and April 2041, the WHO organised several working groups with Zhupao to outline the terms of a charter for the international use of G6, including its integration with the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) and the WHO’s global alert system. In April 2041, Zhupao reorganised its licensing tiers for G6 into a dedicated platform model, with the network’s national and international deployment strictly defined by the WHO charter.

In the spring and summer of 2041, 92 of the 128 countries that supported Resolution ES-13/6 called a series of referendums and snap elections on the question of whether to adopt G6, with over 60% of pro-G6 campaigns and appeals having succeeded by the end of 2041. Many countries that voted in favour made national defence funds available for the licensing of G6, which led to a drop in military spending and a series of geopolitical shifts mainly concerned with fitting the cross-border exchange of G6 data into new or existing unions and protocols. ^[5]

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In October 2045, a breach of Zhupao’s corporate network resulted in the leak of proprietary information on G6, including that it had been heavily retrofitted with quantum neural networks (QNNs) between October 2040 and June 2041. The leak also indicated that Zhupao had been using G6 to aid Chinese and international authorities in the search for Adira, which led to an official caution from the United Nations (UN) for violating the WHO charter.

In June 2047, China reported that G6 had flagged a rise in symptomatic cases of CMD, which led to widespread fears that the second wave of the CMD pandemic was starting earlier than epidemiological forecasts had indicated. The WHO held off on declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) when G6 data coming out of Russia identified the second wave of CMD as a surge in cases of cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD). When other countries reported cases of CSVD in the fall of 2047, Yuri Golitsyn accused China of “trading on CMD phobia” and repeated claims that G6 is “so overfocused on CMD as to render it blind to other constellations of symptoms.” ^[6]

The revelations from the 2045 data breach and repeated false alarms on the second wave of CMD have contributed to a more outspoken anti-G6 sentiment from countries and political groups. In the Indian elections in March 2049, the Aapki Kahani party won a plurality of seats on the promise of withdrawing the country from G6. In the summer of 2049, California successfully sued the United States (US) government for state-level rights to independently define G6 affiliations. In September 2049, Russian President Denis Molchalin faced a leadership challenge from a United Russia faction opposed to Russia’s membership of G6.

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During a press conference on September 28th 2049, Xu was asked whether he expected the trend of G6 licensees questioning their memberships to continue. Xu replied by listing off the network’s accomplishments and encouraged all nations to embrace G6, stating that “it continues to be our wall against the next wave of CMD. The more countries contribute, the better G6 becomes. We need to do this because that is how the system works. That is how it will save us all.”

ControversiesPermalink

NeurosurveillancePermalink

Zhupao has faced criticism from human rights organisations for enabling the use of G6 as a tool for mass neurosurveillance. In September 2040, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay titled The Neurometric Panopticon, in which he described G6 as an “à la carte menu for multimodular oppression.” Doctorow echoed his previous comments on Zhupao’s deployment of neurometric colloids and claimed that “a G6 colloid, any colloid really, is more versatile than Zhupao would have you believe, and lends itself rather well to out-of-the-box surveillance applications hidden behind Sanial’s complex web of patents, licenses, and non-disclosure agreements.” ^[7]

See alsoPermalink

• Zhupao
• Omnius
• Neural colloid

ReferencesPermalink