Suchergebnisse

When news media in the UK and US discuss China's surveillance networks, it is often to imply that the Chinese government is creating a "techno-authoritarian state" to track and monitor its citizens. News outlets, however, are missing a larger point. The specific problem with China's surveillance apparatus is not that it is technologically "totalizing" and "intrusive," but that it relies on a newly digitized information platform that connects surveillance subjects to information about their households and family members, allowing the simultaneous identification and monitoring of everyone in each kinship network. Referred to as the Household Register or hukou, this platform is the backbone of China's "surveillant assemblage" (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Until the late 1990s when it was digitalized, hukou was an individually separate and distinct surveillance system that contained both general and detailed information about a household and its members. With digitalization, hukou became a platform that integrates different computer systems and databases. CCTV surveillance that involves facial recognition and Internet surveillance practices are connected to, and supported by, information from hukou. In the case of CCTV surveillance, cameras equipped with facial recognition features match the face of surveillance subjects with their ID and trace them back to their families. As for Internet surveillance, the connection between hukou and surveillance subjects happens via telephone number. Access to the Internet and social media platforms such as WeChat, SinaWeibo, and e-mail services requires a telephone number purchased with a government-issued ID card, which is connected to a household register and, therefore, the telephone card owner's family. Chinese law enforcement's ability to treat individual Internet users also as "collective units" represents the most distinctive feature of Chinese surveillance, an unlimited source of coercion for the Communist Party to reproduce itself as the ruling party.

AbstractThe literature on crisis management reports that crises can be critical for organizations, including state and extra‐state actors; they either break down or reinvent themselves. Successful organizations, those that do not break down, use situations of crisis to restructure themselves and improve their performance. Applicable to all crises, this reasoning is also valid for the COVID‐19 pandemic and for government organizations in China. Drawing on documentary analysis, this article examines China's pandemic response from the social–political, technological and psychological perspectives using a holistic crisis management framework. It demonstrates that the Chinese state bureaucracy has assembled, expanded and strengthened its surveillance strategies to strive for comprehensive crisis response.