China is always used as the primary example of a surveillance state, people constantly talk about how dystopian it is and how everything you do in public or online is tracked. I have always been skeptical about these claims and know how hypocritical they are because of the amount of surveillance that happens in the west but I want to know if China is really that bad in regards to privacy.
I can’t imagine how the surveillance in China could possibly be worse than in the west. We have CCTV cameras everywhere, the government has a backdoor into every major software platform, smart devices are passively listening to everything we say and do, feds are constantly reading social media and infiltrating message boards, etc. It’s probably the same in China, but the idea that our dystopian panopticon is meaningfully less intrusive than China’s dystopian panopticon is cope.
Western media loves writing stories about things that happen in China that are not unique to China, but that are bad and scary because they happen in China.
the idea that our dystopian panopticon is meaningfully less intrusive than China’s dystopian panopticon is cope.
Well said.
I don't think India is a surveillance state. At least it doesn't look like one so far. The biometric data that is collected doesn't seem to have been consolidated so far and used by the state. At least not in a way that is publicly known.
The mean reason I say this is because India is extremely lawless and this lawlessness seems to be unaffected by the existing surveillance apparatus. Only the a negligible fraction of all violent crimes committed seem to get police response or public attention.
It’s dishonest in the extreme. Everything China does has been done by the west (usually Britain or the US) first. CCTV cameras everywhere? London had very high coverage long before China had them anywhere but critical areas. Cell tracking tech? Guarantee the US has it deployed first and more widespread.
But that doesn’t fit the narrative of China being exceptionally bad. China is usually a step behind the west.
I'm more interested in knowing whether there's truth to it or if it's mainly projection
Yes it's true China has a lot of surveillance. That's like saying China has cops or criminals. Well the west also has cops and surveillance. If your interlocutor is trying to use the existence of such a thing in China as evidence it's bad and they don't also at least think the west is equally bad then they're a hypocrite. It ceases to be a point of any real relevance because it's not a distinction, there's no daylight between China and the west on this, if one wants to take the anarchist path and claim all states are this way and thus we must abolish the state that's honest at least and somewhat consistent, what isn't honest is using a trait common among western states not frequently associated with propaganda and a propagandized image of human rights violations, surveillance and using it to bash China as uniquely evil.
Surveillance level is pretty high but China is also extremely safe. And not just compared to other developing countries.
I'm not sure how much this surveillance contributes to public safety but at the same time I'm inclined to not believe the picture of China that is painted by the West where paranoid authoritarian dictatorship is planting video cameras left and right to suppress dissent. Places like London also have a high concentration of cameras and they still have dangerously high rate of violent crime. They also suppressed a genre of black rap music called drill saying that it promotes knife crimes.
Most major cities and megacities in the world have CCTV networks. China has a lot of CCTV simply on account of China being a huge country on its own with lots of huge cities. Also China doesn't really have many motivators for crime either.
I dunno, I think having the US as an enemy would certainly make me hypervigilant.
Yes.
But don’t think Western nations, especially the US is any better… except China isn’t famous for assassinating people advocating for change in public and DEFINITELY have never dropped C4 out of a helicopter because some people had differing political views.
i don't think that china looks so different than usa. at least in china they truly punish crimes without considering the wealth ot the felon, it seems
I'm in China right now and frequently visit for my job. The concept of privacy in public is indeed very different but it is mostly viewed as for the public good. There are very nice cameras even in the smaller cities that track where you go and when. You will get a fine for crossing the street in Shenzhen through facial recognition. You can also pay for vending machines with your face. There are cameras on most roads with flash to track which vehicles go where and when. To someone from the US it feels incredibly different and invasive, but practically speaking if you respect the laws there is nothing to worry about.
One interesting place this extends to is police surveillance. There is much higher trust of police here than in the US and every interaction I've had with them has been excellent, overall far nicer than any I've encountered in the US. They're monitored in public the same as everyone else after all.
So in short what you hear regarding lack of privacy is mostly true, but likely neglects the general mindset around it. Obviously for minorities who speak out against the party it's pretty problematic, but for most who have political opinions it makes more sense to simply join the party and work within its framework. I'm always surprised how eager people are to discuss politics in China, I originally expected it would be entirely unacceptable to discuss. Also note that in many ways audio is a bigger invasion of privacy than video and we all carry microphones in our pockets at all times even in Western countries.
I'm guessing most advanced countries have advanced surveillance techniques and they are 100% using them to check on their people. 'Surveillance' is also such a container term. Everything from national security to counterterrorism to spying on dissidents to just collecting data can be seen as surveillance. But China bad because it is developing a system on their own outside of the US sphere of influence, I guess. The former head of the Dutch Secret Service has now become Dutch Prime Minister but you don't see the media losing their shit over it. Meanwhile, imagine a person like that becoming the head of state in China.
My Chinese friends always tell me the security in China can be pretty intense, especially going in and out of the country. But they never felt threatened or anything. Anecdotal for sure, but sometimes it seems people forget you can actually talk to Chinese people about their experiences.
Still less surveillance than if you use western tech infested with CIA backdoors and western platforms that are in bed with the national security state.
The better a country becomes at using surveillance technology, the better it also becomes at hiding that it does. Until recently, China has had very little such experience, and thus everything it did was in plain sight. While in the West, intelligence agencies were already watching your moves, listening to your phone calls, and evaluating your metadata through your appliances, you could still see the massive security cameras from the past century on Chinese crosswalks. This is not a question of ideology or economics, every major country and organisation will inevitably try to keep pace as best it can with the evolution of vulnerabilities and threats. The perception of being a surveillance state, on the other hand, depends on the aesthetics of its technology, on the degree that you have the feeling of being stared at by it. Once China replaces the last of its last clunky old cams with more elegant models, citizens and tourists will eventually let go of that perception.
Something I haven't seen touched on in this thread is the nature of surveillance. I find that western (idealism?) thinking often poses things as a binary good/bad in a universalized way. So, for example, state good / state bad, or surveillance good / surveillance bad. Another common one I see on the western internet is people who say censorship bad, free speech good as a sort of ideal, but they gloss over the practicalities of stuff like the Paradox of Tolerance.
I don't know what the surveillance is like in China and you've already received plenty of answers on whether they have it. What I can speak to is I know that in the US, the nature of surveillance and violations of privacy has a distinctly chilling connotation. The US, last I checked, has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It has a loophole for basically slavery through prison labor, or in some cases bare bones wages that are on the borderline. It has a history that includes stuff like MKUltra and COINTELPRO. Or more overt stuff like its history of violence against striking workers and efforts to disrupt them in any way possible. And that's just against its own people. That's not even getting into the CIA and its violent history across the world.
So for a place like the US, surveillance is an extension of the already existing dictatorship of capital and imperialist history abroad. A lot of people in the US don't trust their own government and for good reason (though sometimes the actual reasons they land on are out to lunch, compared to the well-documented ones).
What I'm getting at here is, the dynamic of the US informs the nature of surveillance. So I think it's important to also investigate and take into account what is the nature of surveillance in China. How is it used and for what purposes. What need and intentions has it most developed out of. What kind of accountability processes does it have or enable. I think it's safe to figure that since not every state has the same conditions or goals, the development of surveillance and its purposes will not be identical, and so the way it impacts the citizens and how they think about surveillance also will not be identical.
