Today at Reader's Corner, Minxin Pei, author of The Sentinel State, Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.I'm Bob Custer.Welcome to Reader's Corner.
For decades, China watchers argued that economic liberalization and increasing prosperity would bring democracy to the world's most populous country.Instead, the Communist Party's grip on power is only strengthened. Why?
Well, in his latest book, The Sentinel State, Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, Minxin Pei details the effectiveness of the Chinese surveillance state.
And the source of that effectiveness is not just advanced technology like facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and mobile phone tracking, but China's vast labor-intensive infrastructure of domestic spying.
Minxin Pei is the author of several books on Chinese domestic politics, including China's crony capitalism, the dynamics of regime decay, and China's trapped transition, the limits of developmental autocracy.
He is the Tom and Margot Pritzker 72 professor of government and George R. Roberts fellow at Claremont McKenna College.Minxin Pei, welcome to Reader's Corner.Thank you. Well, I was so fascinated by your book for one very simple reason.
I wonder what it's like to live in China.How does the surveillance that is the subject of your book impact people in China's their daily lives.
And maybe we can begin with a thought on how your life as a professor in Southern California works when it comes to writing a book like this that has an incredible knowledge base, many insights, a little bit of what I might call inside information,
I'm just curious, are you allowed to travel in China?Or do you do most of your research online, shall we say?
Well, I began the research in 2016.I did not go to China because this is a very sensitive topic.If you go to China, nobody's going to talk to you.People will actually know.So these will be policemen, government officials in charge of security.
So there is absolutely no point.But at that time, you could go to Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a library where you can find a lot of local history files, what they call gazettes, police gazettes, local county gazettes.Then you go through them,
you're going to find a lot of useful information.And another source, obviously, is online.China used to be a lot more open than it is today.So government departments, especially police departments, would publish their annual reports online.
and you can access those.And of course, I also spoke to a few dissidents who are in exile in the U.S.and they provided a lot of information from the perspective of the people being watched.
Well, let's give our listeners an idea of this surveillance state.And I'll have you define that for us in a minute.But you kick off your book with an example of a BBC reporter
who in 2017 decided to challenge the Chinese police in finding him by walking the streets of a city in China.Tell us how long it took them to find him.
I think it took less than 15 minutes, maybe even less, because he was in this capital, provincial capital city called Guizhou, which by that time had all the advanced, the most advanced facial recognition technology cameras.
And he, there's actually a video if you watch, if you just Google BBC reporter, found using facial recognition technology in China, you actually saw the video.He was identified, not arrested, but met by smiling policemen within really 10, 15 minutes.
So that's how effective it is.So that's only one piece of the surveillance system.There are other parts of the surveillance system that do not use fancy technology and they're not that visible.
So let's talk about the surveillance state itself.You define that for the reader early on in the book.Why don't you do that for us?
Yeah.The surveillance state actually is a very comprehensive, complex, and vast system.So imagine surveillance state as a human being.So it has to have a brain. and control where decisions are made.
What kind of people to watch, what to do once you catch them.Then there is this arm that is the police.Then there are eyes, informants, cameras.So it's that kind of system.So the system has a command and control system. within the Communist Party.
It has a formal policing bureaucracy, the domestic secret police and also the secret police.Then it also has a network of informants that serve as eyes and ears of the police.And finally, you've got to know who you are going to watch.
So these are the targets.So When you put them together, that is your surveillance system.
Is there a rough count of the number of police China uses to surveil, maybe compared to a Western democracy like the US?
It's actually pretty hard.I think because most of the police in the U.S.are used for routine law enforcement purposes.I don't know the exact number of the U.S.police, but on a per capita basis, probably the U.S.
police in the U.S., the ratio is twice that of China because the U.S.has a lot of police.China, for such a vast country, only about 2 million uniformed police.Probably LAPD alone has 100,000 or 50,000.
So, China does not have a lot of uniformed police.Now, we have to talk about secret police, because a secret police does the job of watching politically sensitive targets, In the US, I think FBI comes closest to a domestic secret police.
But of course, FBI's primary mission is fighting crime, not to watch political opponents.In China, my estimate is that the domestic secret police is roughly between 60,000 to 90,000.
So it is also relatively small, but China has the equivalent of the CIA and FBI's counterintelligence, or you might say China has some sort of KGB. That bureaucracy, we really don't know how large that bureaucracy is.So comparing China and the U.S.
is almost like comparing apples and oranges, because the missions of law enforcement in two countries vary significantly, especially in terms of targeting political opponents.
Now, even though the U.S.doesn't have as many official police, or excuse me, has more official police than say China does, on the informant network.Now this is where China wins the grand prize.Please share with us how that comes about.
Yes, precisely because China does not have a lot of uniform police, it has to recruit a very large number of informants.They collect information, intelligence, leads and help the police.So China has several categories of informants.
Those who directly work with the police, they are called special intelligence personnel.They are very similar to what US police would recruit, because recruiting informers is a standard policing tactic.It's used throughout the world.
China is no exception.The U.S.is no exception.Except China has another category of informants.These are called xinxiyuan in Chinese.They are literally translated as informants.And most of their
job is to help the government watch other politically suspect people.So based on local data, we have roughly about 1% of the population.
So as many as 1% of the population, and that's 15 million people in China performing that kind of tasks, at least on paper.
then I think the US or any other country would not have the ability to recruit and maintain such a vast network of informants helping the government.
Now I mentioned in the intro, that there is a significant difference between the number of surveilled citizens that are watched carefully in China now compared to the days of Mao.And I wonder if you could share with us how that works.
I mean Mao had one kind of regime when it comes to control and supervision of citizens, but then we get into the post-Tiananmen Square era and it becomes even more significant.
Okay, well, these are the biggest differences between now and the Maoist period.In the Maoist period, they watched on a sort of, in terms of the ratio, what percentage of population, the Maoist period probably watched slightly a bit more.
My research shows that the Maoist period roughly 1.5 to 1.6% of the population are placed under regular surveillance.So this is one.Today, my estimate is about 1%.So Maoist period watched a bit more.
And in Maoist period, if you are on the watch, you would lose your civil liberties.You could not move. travel.Today, if you're on a government blacklist, it's called key individuals or key population, you can still travel.
So today the task is a lot more difficult because in the most period, you're essentially on the house arrest. So today, and in Mao's period, people did not move around a lot, travel.So it was easy to watch people.
The Mao's period had a much less resourced law enforcement apparatus. Today, China has a much more, much better equipped police apparatus.
So technologically, China is much better today than in the Maoist period, even though China watched a few people formally under surveillance.
You're listening to Professor Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna College. His book is The Sentinel State, Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.Let's cover one more aspect of this surveillance.
This, I guess you could say, is the more basic term, door knocking.I was surprised, but I shouldn't be surprised to see that aside from all this high-tech surveillance, there's the old-fashioned kind.
Oh, yeah, I think the Chinese system is effective because it is really a combination of both technology and manpower.So, for example, if you don't see this guy on camera for a couple of days, you get worried, where is this guy?
You have to go to his house and knock on his door. and to make sure he's in his residence.So door knocking is a standard routine policing or surveillance tactic around key dates.
For example, in China, June 4th, the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary is a key date.So you don't want a lot of people under your watch.You don't want to lose track of these people.
So around June 1st, you would send a team, typically a local policeman, a neighborhood official, and somebody from your work unit, your employer.You would go to his house and knock on his door to make sure that he's there.
And of course, you deliver a warning and say you don't you don't fool around for the next four days.So this actually is done throughout the country.Imagine the amount of manpower employed to do door knocking.
So you refer in your book to preventive repression, which I think you've just described in a very effective manner in that, in a sense, the government is there to scare people into conformity and not take any chances getting involved in some activity that is outside the government's reach.
But I have to believe in a country as large as China, there will always be those who decide to take chances, who organize in ways that would not be approved by the Chinese Communist Party.What's your thoughts on that?
Yes, I think you do whatever prevention you can.Prevention obviously does its job in the case of China.You intimidate them, you tell them you actually know what they're up to, so they would not try to go ahead.I think there is a limit to prevention.
Besides those who are truly frustrated or who would not care about the consequences, that's a relatively minority.One group of people are those who go to Beijing repeatedly to present their petitions.
They're called the repeat petitioners because they have been wronged.The judiciary, local governments cannot solve their problems, so they would go to Beijing.And they will be intercepted, they will be beaten up, mistreated, but they will still go.
So that's one group.But prevention cannot deal with people whom you normally do not suspect.So my favorite example is the anti-lockdown protests in Beijing, November 2020.It's not just Beijing, it's throughout China.
So you ask, how come this very, very sophisticated, vast surveillance system
failed to detect because the people who were organizing, or they did not even organize, because it was organized instantly by Twitter, by social media, because most of, nearly all the protesters were not your usual suspects.
So the government could not know beforehand what they were up to, their phones were not bugged, So there is a limit to what the surveillance system can do and cannot do.
So just to summarize, truly desperate people, they just don't care because they have nothing to lose.
And on the other side, the people you never suspect, people who have not really been a target of the system, but somehow the system has angered them and they decide to protest.
We hear quite a bit in the news about the control of the internet in China.Tell us about the cyber police unit and what its job is.
We know that China does a very good job filtering the content, that is censoring what comes out, what you can see, what you can read.
I think China has another secret way of controlling the internet, that is to make sure it knows who is on the internet. Because once you know who is on the internet, it's actually a much more powerful way of controlling people's online behavior.
Because if you know that the moment you get on the internet, the police will be watching you, then obviously you're going to be a lot more careful.So the Chinese, one way that the method I'm describing is that in China, they, of course, if you use
mobile phone, the government knows your IP, because these are state-owned companies, so they will know you instantly.But they also want to make sure if you go to an internet cafe, you would not be anonymous, because to swipe your national ID.
Your national ID has a chip embedded in it.And the police would know right away because that ID reader is connected with the cyber police.So the cyber police would know that you are on the internet.So in China, all the public Wi-Fi has
a special device that reads your IP and reports your IP to the police.So these tactics are really effective in identifying the users of the Chinese Internet.
How extensive is surveillance at Chinese universities?I think at one point in your book, you talked about how easy it was to recruit informants, that is, students at the universities who I guess will spy on each other.
Well, let's just go back a little bit.1989, the massive pro-democracy demonstrations took place throughout China.That's largely because university students.So after 1989, the government said, well, no more.We're going to take back the campuses.
So what they did was a very comprehensive program, but one of the methods they used was to recruit a very large number of informants.
every class, every classroom, every you might call entering class, they would make sure there are enough informants who will be what's going on on the campuses.
So when you look at what has happened in the 35 years since Tiananmen, Chinese universities have been amazingly quiet.
And I think one of the explanations is that the government did succeed in taking back the universities, largely through very effective surveillance.
You're listening to Professor Minxin Pei.He is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and he's written a book, The Sentinel State, Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush thought that economic modernization would eventually open Chinese society and its government to pro-democracy reform.That didn't happen, and I'd like your take on why it didn't.
how much time do we have?There's a subject a lot of people have spent endless hours working on.So just to cut it short, I think I compare some economic modernization leading to democracy or some form of democracy or more open society
and how dictatorships adjust to economic modernization as a race, the race between two forces.
You have to admit, on the one hand, economic modernization does create favorable conditions for democracy, much more information, much more mobile, physically mobile, upward, socially mobile society, and you might call more middle class, and much higher levels of education.
and a lot more wealth controlled by private actors.So if you put these together, these are clearly the favorable factors for eventual democracy.
But we often forget that the dictators, the rulers of autocracy that is undergoing rapid economic modernization, would see these things.They say, how do we deal with this?So they, of course, do all kinds of things.
But one of the things that they do is to develop the capabilities of watching people, whether it is by recruiting more policemen.So between 1989 and 2010, number of Chinese policemen rose by 300 times.
So between 1991 and 2020, spending on domestic security, which is really law enforcement, has gone up by more than 20 times in real terms.So what they are going to do, yeah,
We have a much more mobile, much more wealthy society, but we're going to put a lot more eyes on them.We're going to have to put a lot more muscles on them.So there is this race.
In the short term, you can say that a determined, well-resourced, because economic modernization provides a lot of revenue for the government.
containing the very forces generated by economic modernization that might at some point bring down a dictatorship.So this is the race I'm talking about.
Right, right.Your final question in the conclusion of your book is, will this powerful surveillance state perpetuate Chinese Communist Party rule?And you've certainly given significant evidence throughout your book that it will,
But on the other hand, in your conclusion, you point out that it might not be that easy.
Oh, yeah.I think surveillance is just one of the tools in this toolkit. with which the Communist Party or any other dictatorship would perpetuate its power.Let me give you just one simple example.
The Chinese surveillance system watches about 1% of the people.It uses 1% of the population as informants.So this system works pretty well if the economy is doing pretty well and there are a lot of people who are angry with the leadership.
economic stagnation, there will be less resources invested in surveillance.But also at the same time, you're going to have a lot more unemployed people, a lot more angry people.Can you actually deal with a completely different situation?
My answer is no, because this is actually a very dynamic situation.It is not a static situation.What has worked in the past does not mean that it will continue to work in the future.
I'm gonna ask one question that isn't necessarily a topic in your book.NBC News reported recently that last year, over 37,000 Chinese migrants crossed our southern border.The question I would have is, well, how did they get to the southern border?
That is, how did they get into Latin America or South America, given the constraints placed on them back home?
And then secondly, and this is probably naive of me to consider, but are all 37,000 of those necessarily poor migrants, or might some of those be folks who are coming into the country to spy?
The second question I can deal with, I think they don't need to take such risks, go through such hardship, going all the way from the southern border to come into this country, because they can easily land in the Kennedy Airport, flying business class, and living, traveling in style.
So Suti, the country, there is one country in South America where Chinese citizens do not need visas to, and that's Ecuador.
So they would fly to Ecuador and then take this long journey through Panama all the way down through the Darién Gap, a horrendous journey.Most of them are middle class or lower middle class who can at least afford a plane ticket.
because what they see in China economically is not very encouraging.And they believe that the US promises a much better future for them.So they would take the risks.So most of them are economic migrants, other than political refugees.
My final question is also one that is not necessarily a subject of your book, but I just wondered what your thoughts are on the banning of TikTok by the Congress of the United States.
Well, I think American politicians have made their mind.So it depends on what you want to accomplish.
In terms of preventing the TikTok from being a spy tool for China, probably banning it has marginal effect because China now can purchase gazillions of bits of data
from other sort of legitimate service third party data providers who collect Americans' data for sale to anybody who would willing to pay.I think it clearly is a huge slap in the face for China because it's a first time.And then I think for
And so there were two issues.Most of the investors in TikTok are actually Americans.So ironically, this Trump supporter, a billionaire who is going to lose tens of billions of dollars because he's the biggest investor in TikTok.
And the other issue potentially in the future sort of how people view the U.S.as a champion of press freedom, internet freedom.So America's image might suffer some kind of debt.So it is not a costless act.
Well, Professor Minxin Pei, you answered the question I raised at the beginning of this conversation.
I got all the information I ever needed to know about how the Chinese deal with the surveillance state, thanks to your very thorough research and writing of this book.
It's called The Sentinel State, Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.Its author is Professor Minxin Pei. of Claremont McKenna College, thank you so much for joining us today at Reader's Corner.
Thank you, Bob.It's been a pleasure.
Reader's Corner is presented by Boise State Public Radio News.The engineer for today's show is Eric Jones with production by Joel Wayne.I'm Bob Kustra.
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