This is part of a Globe and Mail series in which Beijing correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe looks at China's present and future challenges before his return to Canada. The people tapping on keyboards at Liang Zhi Data Technology possess an unusual set of skills. Some have backgrounds in artificial intelligence, a skill set that has grown common across the Chinese high-tech companies. They are experts in economics, and their work at Liang Zhi is to find new ways of making decisions from data. Mr. Shao stands at the forefront of a bid to bring authoritarian capital – the Chinese economic model – into the supercomputer age.

A new trove of highly classified leaked documents from the Chinese communist government shows how Beijing operates their widespread concentration camps where they reportedly have millions of Muslims and other minorities locked-up. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reports that the leaked documents reveal that "Chinese police are guided by a massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence to select entire categories of Xinjiang residents for detention." The manual obtained by ICIJ gives detailed instructions on everything from deciding when to let detainees use the toilet to how to keep the camps' existence totally secret. "The China Cables reveal how the system is able to amass vast amounts of intimate personal data through warrantless manual searches, facial recognition cameras, and other means to identify candidates for detention, flagging for investigation hundreds of thousands merely for using certain popular mobile phone apps. The documents detail explicit directives to arrest Uighurs with foreign citizenship and to track Xinjiang Uighurs living abroad, some of whom have been deported back to China by authoritarian governments. Among those implicated as taking part in the global dragnet: China's embassies and consulates."

As confusion reigned among Shanghai citizens over the correct classification of waste since the city's trash sorting regime kicked in on July 1, China's tech giants have been quick to jump in with solutions. Shanghai was the first Chinese city to enforce new regulations for waste management, as the superpower attempts to curb its trash production that has already overtaken the United States'. Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com announced last week that it had launched artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to make trash classifications smarter. The Snapshop trash sorting function can be found in the JD Finance app. Users may search for "垃圾分类(trash sorting)" to open it.