China is distributing intrusive tools of surveillance and social control throughout Latin America to “surround the United States” with potential threats, warns a top senator.

“China's goal is to displace the United States, and they can do that by wreaking havoc in the Western Hemisphere,” Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner told the Washington Examiner.

That's the strategy behind China’s decision to support Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, who is clinging to power almost three months after President Trump and other leaders of Western democracies recognized opposition lawmaker Juan Guaidó as the country's interim president, the Republican said. China has exported technology that helps the South American socialist simultaneously monitor and strong-arm the Venezuelan people, according to U.S. and regional officials.

“The more China becomes intertwined with our Western Hemisphere nations, the more likely it is they can surveil, they can monitor, they can surround the United States,” said Gardner, who leads the Foreign Relations subcommittee on the Asia-Pacific region.

The situation is already serious, experts say. "The level of actual Chinese influence and power across the Western Hemisphere right now is far, far greater than it ever was with the Soviet Union in the Cold War," Evan Ellis, a Latin America analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, told the Washington Examiner.

China has drawn international condemnation for keeping a close watch on political dissidents with advanced surveillance techniques while using major economic players to gain leverage outside its borders. ZTE, an international telecommunications giant tied to Chinese intelligence agencies, has played a key role in such efforts, at home and abroad. The company helped develop a “social credit system” that allows authorities in Beijing to monitor the population, doling out punishments for disfavored activities such as cigarette smoking.

Maduro is copying those tactics, with ZTE's help — the regime paid the company $70 million to create a database and payment system for a “homeland card” (carnet de la patria).

“We are aware of reports that ZTE has sold technology to the Venezuelan government which may be used to control access to food, cash bonuses, and other social services through the use of a social credit system as a political control mechanism,” a State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “We oppose the sale of smart cards to the Maduro regime, since these could serve as a form of social control, deny social services, or otherwise contribute to human rights abuses.”

A recent report from the Organization of American States found that the Maduro regime’s use of the cards to reward friends and punish enemies is one of the reasons millions of Venezuelans have fled the country. The card, which reportedly includes information on how its owner has voted, is required to access social programs, including those that distribute food and medicine in the country with shortages of both.

“It's the most overt case where you see it being used for social control in support of a friendly dictatorship,” Ellis said. “These technologies keep friendly dictatorships in power and undermine U.S. democracy and interests.”

ZTE has been helping the Iranian regime track dissidents since at least 2010. Its relationship with Maduro has “truly frightening” implications in the Western Hemisphere, Ellis says, because China has given other governments in the region substantial surveillance capabilities that could eventually be used for social control. In Ecuador, for instance, law enforcement officials have purchased a network of Chinese security cameras with facial recognition software. Similar deals have been struck in regions of Argentina, Bolivia, Panama, and Uruguay.

“You've basically created a Chinese security surveillance state at our front door,” Gardner told the Washington Examiner. “Eventually it's not just surveillance, eventually it's not just that social control. Eventually it's a naval base, eventually it's more technology, and eventually the colonialism moves from the economic side to the military side, and that is a danger the United States cannot accept.”

As they spread, the cameras and databases that Maduro and other authoritarians use to monitor populations will give Chinese officials the capacity to monitor leaders. The Communists could snoop into everything from private diplomatic conversations to “who the prime minister is sleeping with,” Ellis predicts. If enough countries adopt Chinese technology, Beijing will be able to integrate the different assets into a transnational, “incredibly effective surveillance complex" that reinforces China's political and economic influence.

"It will be an extreme danger, both in terms of maintaining and advancing China's commercial gains as well as its political gains," Ellis said. "When you're at a stage where China has that amount of knowledge over partner nations ... the ability to resist or work against China will become extremely difficult."