From Susan Jakes, editor, China File
I’m excited to tell you about a major new project from ChinaFile, just published: “State of Surveillance: Government Documents Reveal New Evidence on China’s Efforts to Monitor Its People,” by ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke and the German Marshall Fund’s Mareike Ohlberg. The article draws on an analysis of some 76,000 publicly available Chinese government procurement documents related to surveillance tech and services over the past 15 years. It presents what the co-authors describe as the “most comprehensive accounting of China’s surveillance build-up to date,” one that substantially fleshes out what is already known about this sprawling enterprise, but also breaks much new ground and serves as a corrective for more impressionistic (and often hyperbolic) reporting on this subject.
The key is the volume and richness of the documents. It wasn’t feasible for Batke or Ohlberg to travel to China to report on the ground, but by combining painstaking quantitative research on their dataset with a deep mining of individual documents, they were able to glean not only a sense of how fast and how far surveillance is spreading across China (quite fast, and very far) but also a sense of how Chinese officials shopping for, say, facial recognition software and WiFi-sniffers understand the purpose of these purchases, what they hope to accomplish, and why they believe so fervently that their neighbors need to be under constant watch.
They’ll introduce you to Party cadres in the southern town of Xiqiao building a “portrait perception network” to make sure they have multiple opportunities to capture the faces of every person who enters their jurisdiction. They’ll take you to Shawan county in Xinjiang, for a tour of a complex camera deployment system that is also in use in towns across China. Finally, you’ll get a view of the Xiangfang district of the city of Harbin where officials are shopping for software to help them predict what kinds of people could potentially become terrorists.
Along with the main story, you’ll find a collection of additional resources on surveillance budgeting, technology, and bureaucratic control, as well as a detailed explanation of the story’s research methods. If you’re too busy over the next few days to read the full piece, use this helpful summary.
Any project this ambitious takes a lot out of the lives of its authors. This one has entailed an unusual abundance of pure toil. Jessica and Mareike have persevered through months of eye-crossing computation and software design and read through untold volumes of bone-dry technical documents in Chinese—and that was before the even bigger job of bringing their data to life on the page. They accomplished all of this with good cheer, while contending with the serious dislocations of the pandemic which wreaked chaos on editorial schedules and computer systems and made an already long process often excruciatingly protracted. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating them on their efforts.
We are all grateful for the bounty of assistance we received along the way. Former ChinaFile fellows Shen Lu and Iris Zhang contributed critical research for the piece; Shazeda Ahmed at UC Berkeley (a former ChinaFile intern), Jeffrey Knockel of Citizen Lab, and Paul Mozur at The New York Times generously gave us their time and their advice. Perry Link helped refine our translation of a key quote. Muyi Xiao, our former Visuals Editor, helped shape the project at the very beginning and has been a constant source of encouragement and tough questions ever since.
Like all ChinaFile stories, this one benefitted in ways small and monumental from the vigilant eye of our Associate Editor, Sara Sega-Williams, whose fact-checking and double-checking is infuriatingly essential. The article got some additional expert tailoring from Abby Seif, who has also provided editing support to ChinaFile more broadly to give us the time we needed to get “State of Surveillance” out the door. Our colleagues at the Center on U.S.-China Relations, Orville Schell, Laura Chang, Michael Laha, and Ouyang Bin, asked terrific questions along the way, helping us refine our ideas and clarify our conclusions.
We’re grateful to Cao Mengwen and Noopur Agarwal for their work on graphics, and we were overjoyed when Ai Weiwei gave us the photograph of his stone camera that opens the piece.
The article is part of an ongoing series and we look forward to sharing new pieces of it with all of you in the coming weeks and months.
—Susan Jakes |
