Are Chinese residents okay with being almost constantly watched by the Chinese government? Maybe not if they’ve had cameras pointed at their front door to keep them from stepping out and spreading COVID-19.
But according to a survey of more than 4,000 Chinese citizens conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, respondents give their government an average ranking of 7.3 out of 10 in the category of “trust.” When asked about surveillance cameras and how much local surveillance they’re comfortable with, only 22.6 percent say that they want less surveillance. Thirty-nine percent say that the current level is fine, and 38.4 percent want even more surveillance.
Respondents are more likely to object to the government’s use of facial recognition software or biometric data, which is the sort of thing used to track Uyghurs and Tibetans.
In an article for The Register, Laura Dobberstein reports that ASPI
provided a tool that could be considered quite subversive in China: an interactive website that provided access to uncensored non-Beijing information about deployed surveillance technologies and the agencies that run them. It consisted of five educational modules with quizzes at the end.
The website content was shaped by the survey results and reached over 55,000 users over the course of four months. It covered facial recognition, Wi-Fi probes, DNA surveillance, database management and surveillance cameras.
ASPI declined to describe how the platform was distributed “to ensure both the security of participants and ongoing research opportunities.”
ASPI researchers Daria Impiombato, Yvonne Lau, and Luisa Gyhn concede that the survey results probably do not convey the opinions of respondents with unquestionable accuracy. “In any context, public-opinion data comes with the caveat that participants might not respond completely truthfully to every question. That risk is higher in contexts in which expressing dissenting opinions carries personal risks, and perhaps even more so for a sensitive issue such as surveillance.” Nor can the research methods, being partly secret, be independently assessed.
Even so, the survey responses are plausible; they jibe with other evidence of public attitudes in China and with our understanding of how tyrannies persist. Whether eagerly or reluctantly, those ruled by a state must largely consent to its governance. As Étienne de La Boétie, author of The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, argued more than four centuries ago, no tyranny can last indefinitely unless those who are subjected to it “permit, or, rather, bring about their own subjection.”
