'Smart Cities' for a Supposedly Stupid People
Has the West Dodged the World Economic Forum's Totalitarian Global Control?
by Robert Williams • April 8, 2025 at 5:00 am
[World Economic Forum founder Klaus] Schwab appears to be a great admirer of the Chinese Communist state, which he praised in 2022 as a "model" to emulate.
In reality, the purpose of the smart city, as seen by its widespread use in China, has little to do with improving quality of life. Instead, it is overwhelmingly about state surveillance, followed by total monitoring and control of the inhabitants and the uninhibited extraction of their data for its system of social credits.
Smart cities, in fact, are a Chinese Communist idea, established by the Chinese government in its 12th Five-Year Plan, issued in 2011.
In China, smart cities have been purposely developed into terrifying tyrannical nightmares. In many cities, including Shanghai and Hangzhou, every district has a data-hub, known as a so-called "City Brain," that monitors and stores unbelievable amounts of information about all citizens. The data is gathered by millions and millions of surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, aided by artificial intelligence. They all feed in the smallest details, such as whether a construction worker is wearing his helmet on the job, wrongful disposal of garbage and other minute offenses. Police patrols access the monitoring systems through a mobile app, to enable them to act immediately against any offenses of the law.
Offenses lead a citizen to receive a low social credit score, which in turn can lead to blacklisting from traveling on airplanes and high-speed trains, a ban on leaving the country, denial of access to services and even being barred from renting an apartment. This is the Chinese system which Schwab so openly admires.
According to a 2024 World Population Review article, "Smart cities started in Europe with early adopters being Barcelona and Amsterdam..." No mention of China and its more than 500 smart cities, because that might start people questioning the plan. Better to pretend that it is a European concept.
But who is watching the watchers? The entire concept is based on the fox watching the henhouse.
Schwab has made it clear that he and his political and business cohorts have a grim, all-encompassing grip in store for the free world – total surveillance, total control.
Schwab's own yearly Davos meetings, in which the world's political, business and cultural elites hold secret meetings about the future of the world without facing any critical questions, are -- obviously -- not subject to any form of transparency. The WEF is apparently so fearful of criticism and transparency that it has turned off comments on its own X account.
Elected leaders, ostensibly in Davos to take care of "we the people's" interests, continue to worship at Schwab's altar nevertheless. They flock to his annual January meeting there, presumably in the hope that they, the anointed, will be the chosen to be the rulers in his elite global politburo.
Once upon a time, long before the Covid-19 lockdowns, the West pretended to be concerned about things such as freedom, the right to privacy, and the dangers of surveillance and data harvesting from its citizens. China's surveillance police state was, at least publicly, mostly described as an abomination that threatened human rights -- not an example to emulate.
Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case. For years, in the name of environmental sustainability, energy efficiency, safety and convenience, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF), led by Klaus Schwab, have been promoting global surveillance in the form of so-called "smart cities." In China, already by 2018, there were more than 500 smart cities in place.
