Over the past two decades, China’s leaders have built a high-tech surveillance formula likely to be of ordinary sophistication. Facial popularity software, web surveillance, and ubiquitous video cameras make it seem like the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has finally delivered on everything. the dictator’s dream of building a surveillance state like George Orwell’s 1984 envisioned.
A high-tech surveillance network now covers the entire country, and the strength of this formula was fully demonstrated in November 2022, when nationwide protests against China’s Covid lockdown caught the party by surprise. Although protesters were careful to hide their faces with masks and hats, police used knowledge of the phone’s location to locate them. Mass arrests followed.
Beijing’s surveillance state isn’t just a technological feat. It is also based on a labor-intensive organization. Over the course of more than eight decades, the CCP has built a vast network of millions of informants and spies whose unpaid work has proven indispensable. for the survival of the regime. It is those men and women, rather than cameras or synthetic intelligence, that have allowed Beijing to suppress dissent. Without a network of this size, the formula couldn’t work. This means that, despite the party’s more productive efforts, China’s security apparatus is highly unlikely to export.
The CCP’s state security formula has worked well for China. But as the country faces unprecedented economic difficulties, the apparatus will come under new pressures and strains. The party-state may find it more complicated not only because of its technological dominance, but also because it depends on the participation of civilian informants who are the lifeblood of its surveillance regime.
China has two main domestic security agencies. There is the Ministry of State Security, which is responsible for external espionage and domestic counterintelligence. It does not spy on Chinese citizens, except when they are suspected of having foreign connections. The Political Security Protection unit in the Ministry of Public Security is in charge of domestic surveillance. The MPS includes specialized units, as well as frontline beat cops. There is a clear division of labor between the MSS and the MPS, and they recruit informants separately. Beijing does not publish up-to-date information on the MSS, although it did disclose a decade ago that the total number of uniformed policemen was around two million. Today it is likely to be moderately higher due to a bigger domestic security budget.
Building a surveillance apparatus is a complex task for an autocratic regime. Generations of Chinese leaders have struck a delicate balance between making the secret police strong enough to do their job, but not so strong that they threaten the regime itself. Even if China’s leaders succeed in this task, the resulting security apparatus is not cheap. In 2022, Beijing spent 1. 44 trillion yuan (about $202 billion) on internal security, a spending category that covers the regular police, the MSS, the People’s Armed Police, courts, prosecutors and prisons. roughly equivalent to its overall defense spending. That number will most likely increase as Beijing develops, modernizes and maintains its facial popularity programs, Skynet and Sharp Eyes. Neither is cheap: When Sharp Eyes was launched in 2016, Beijing spent three hundred billion yuan on hardware and installation alone.
To avoid creating a rival to its own power, the PCC divides policing responsibilities among other sets of security forces and other state-affiliated actors. This organization has two distinct advantages. This prevents the formation of a tough secret police capable of controlling the increase in information and posing a risk to the party. And it allows the party to gain advantages from the participation of state-owned companies, universities and other entities that pass data to the government, without extending the duration of the secret police. This style requires close coordination, which is why the PCC maintains a political-legal committee that has the general responsibility of ensuring internal security at all levels of the State. The party is further controlling the surveillance state by striking CCP officials in all security units and imposing a five-year term limit on most smart security chiefs, adding ministers of the MSS and MPS. In the former Soviet Union and East Germany there were no such restrictions; It is not unexpected that the secret police chiefs of these regimes have amassed enormous power.
Financial constraints have long limited the PCC’s ability to build a meaningful national security force, let alone an elite, well-paid, and well-equipped secret police network. A comparison with East Germany’s Stasi is instructive. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Stasi was the world’s largest secret police force in relative terms, with one officer for every 165 East German citizens. In addition, the Stasi had 189,000 informants (about 1. 1% of the population). The number of Chinese officials covering political security in the domestic surveillance rate is ranked. But the knowledge I’ve gathered in a small number of localities, which was probably leaked by mistake, suggests that there are only between 60,000 and 100,000. , which means that there is a maximum of one civil servant for every 14,000 Chinese citizens.
As a result, the PCC will have to rely on its organizational presence within state-affiliated social and economic institutions, as well as local communities, to recruit gigantic numbers of informants. These citizens can spy on their colleagues or neighbors, and since their participation is ensured through coercion or incentive, it doesn’t cost much to keep them in office. Data released by 30 local governments show that between 0. 73 percent and 1. 1 percent of China’s population – perhaps as many as 15 million more people – serve as informants. In addition to this number, the regular and secret police maintain separate networks of paid spies and unpaid informants whose precise numbers are elegant. The number of informants in communities and workplaces varies depending on the wishes and discretion of local authorities. In some universities, for example, each class has an informant who delivers a biweekly or monthly report to an official who is usually a party official. Information or intelligence generated through informants includes updates on the activities of members of banned sects and underground devotional outfits, as well as public reaction to government policy or primary political events.
Analysis of data generated by tipsters from a small pattern of jurisdictions shows that only about 40% of tipsters are active. However, awareness that classmates, coworkers, and neighbors might be spies is more likely intended to discourage other people from engaging in activities or speaking that might get them in trouble.
Chinese surveillance systems, which were established long before the advent of advanced surveillance technologies, began as labor-intensive systems—and still are. The MSS and MPS’s most prevalent tactic remains what the party calls “controlling battlefield positions,” or monitoring critical public venues (airports, railway stations, and hotels) and social institutions (in particular, universities and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries) for activities that pose threats to public safety and regime security. Typically, controlling battlefield positions involves frequent in-person inspection of compliance by the frontline police to ensure that the staff of these public venues are keeping records and reporting their customers’ identities and transactions. For example, the cyberpolice frequently inspect Internet cafes to confirm that the proprietors are recording their customers’ ID cards. Local data suggest that about 40 percent of the “special intelligence personnel” recruited by the police are assigned battlefield-position duties. Technology, such as digitized information system and video cameras, plays a complementary but largely secondary role in this.
Another effective surveillance tactic is intimidating and monitoring people the CCP classifies as “key individuals,” or KIs. These are members of banned cults and religious groups, petitioners, protesters, people with mental illnesses, and drug users. Police conduct “door knock” operations to verify KIs’ physical whereabouts, to intimidate them, and to warn them against taking part in undesirable activities. Another method is to form a team of five people—usually a beat cop, a neighborhood committee official, a representative of the targeted individual’s employer, a family member of the target, and an informant in close physical proximity to the target—to keep a close eye on potential troublemakers, especially repeat petitioners who may stage protests or travel to Beijing to embarrass local authorities.
China’s surveillance systems are labor-intensive systems (and still are).
These two tactics are highly labor-intensive, which is also true of China’s two mass surveillance programs. One is operated by the police and the other by local authorities. Data from dozens of local jurisdictions suggest that the police program monitors somewhere between 3.4 million and 5.0 million individuals, mostly ex-convicts and criminal suspects, and that the other keeps tabs on somewhere between 3.9 million and 7.7 million people. Although a breakdown of this targeted population is not available, it appears that many of those under surveillance are viewed as potential protesters. In particular, they appear to be former People’s Liberation Army soldiers, repeat petitioners, members of ethnic minorities, or adherents of groups that the CCP considers cults.
The advancing generation has particularly improved the state’s ability to track blacklisted Americans. The PHM maintains a digitized national database of KI that local law enforcement governments have access to, meaning those Americans are tracked physically and electronically. When a KI travels, a formula that captures cell phone data can generate automatic alerts. Americans’ online activities, known as the “KI Internet,” are heavily monitored through China’s cyber police, using complex but undisclosed technical means.
Despite complicated technological tools, it is the organizational functions of the Chinese Leninist Party-State that allow its surveillance to function with unprecedented power. This style is not exportable to autocracies that are less organized and have a superficial reach in their societies and economies. These countries can import Chinese equipment. But they can’t import Beijing’s formula, which means they’re unlikely to expand equivalent surveillance functions.
China’s surveillance state arguably would have helped prevent the emergence of concerted opposition to the CCP in the post-Tiananmen era, but political stability was also a product of the country’s high degrees of economic growth. a less favourable economic environment. But that environment is emerging: The housing bubble has burst, putting pressure on local government budgets that in the past relied on proceeds from land sales to fund their operations, and about one in five young people now unemployed. These economic challenges will make it more difficult for Beijing to manage the emerging costs of maintaining and upgrading its high-tech surveillance equipment. This may also pose a specific challenge for the Skynet and Sharp Eyes projects, which are financed through debt. Local governments burdened by the crisis and therefore most likely to face increasing difficulties in the coming years of scarcity.
The effect of prolonged economic malaise is likely to create three upheavals for China’s labor-intensive surveillance apparatus. First, unemployment, declining incomes, and diminishing opportunities will fuel social unrest, increasing the burden on security systems as more other people engage in activities that the party deems threatening. Second, developing discontent can also make it more difficult to recruit new informants. Third, if revenues are stagnant, whistleblowers could demand higher compensation, expanding the intelligence-gathering burden.
A failed surveillance state will provide China’s leaders with several options. Beijing would possibly treat its citizens better in the hope that this would limit protests. Alternatively, the country’s leaders may also simply ask for less from the security apparatus, which of late targets many other people who pose little or no genuine risk to the party’s power. However, the maximum likely outcome is that when comfortable repression through surveillance fails, the party will begin to resort to harsh repression. The surveillance state can also be replaced through anything. much worse.