The Sentinel State
Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
Countering recent hype around technology, a leading expert argues that the endurance of dictatorship in China owes less to facial recognition AI and GPS tracking than to the human resources of the Leninist surveillance state.
China watchers long argued that economic liberalization and prosperity would be harbingers of democracy. Instead, the Communist Party’s grip has strengthened. How? The answer lies in the effectiveness of the surveillance state. And the source of that effectiveness is not just facial recognition AI and phone tracking. Technology is important, but what matters more is China’s vast army of domestic spies.
Central government surveillance data is confidential, so Minxin Pei turned to local reports, police gazettes, leaked documents, and interviews with exiled dissidents to provide a detailed look at the evolution, organization, and tactics of the surveillance state. Following the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, the Party invested in a coercive apparatus operated by a small number of secret police capable of mobilizing millions of citizen informants. The Party’s Leninist bureaucratic structure—whereby officials and activists penetrate every sector of the economy and civil society, from universities to delivery companies to monasteries—ensures that Beijing’s eyes and ears are everywhere.
Rigorously empirical and rich in historical insight, The Sentinel State is a singular contribution to our knowledge about Chinese state coercion and, more generally, the survival strategies of authoritarian regimes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this meticulous study, Pei (China's Crony Capitalism), a professor of political science at Claremont Mckenna College, recaps the rise of China's surveillance apparatus, now infamous for its scary ensemble of technologies like ubiquitous surveillance cameras, facial-recognition software, and Wi-Fi sniffers that can track people in real time. However, the key to China's surveillance prowess, Pei asserts, isn't the futuristic gear but the human element, namely the Leninist party-state that extends its tentacles into businesses, universities, and neighborhood associations; recruits millions of secret informants; and deploys "door-knocking" missions to intimidate malcontents. The result, Pei notes, is a soft totalitarianism that subtly deters and dissuades political opposition before it gets going, as when dissident Wang Tiancheng was kept at home on the anniversary of the Tianmen Square massacre by secret policemen who showed up and offered to run all his errands so he would not have to leave his apartment. Writing in lucid if somewhat dry prose, Pei ably untangles and demystifies the Chinese surveillance system: for all its obscure and sinister aura, he paints it as the work of harried bureaucrats who struggle with glitchy equipment and unproductive employees. (Sixty percent of informants, Pei reckons, produce no intelligence at all.) It adds up to a clear-eyed account of China's surveillance crusade.
