Or as The Register puts it, “China cracks down on personal information collection. No, seriously” (March 31, 2025). “China last week commenced a crackdown on inappropriate collection and subsequent use of personal information.”
Four different CCP agencies joined forces to announce stronger enforcement of privacy laws. (Which, if China has them, don’t mean much. China also has laws “protecting” freedom of speech and freedom of religion, etc.)
Data
The four government agencies are supposedly worried about things like social media services or smart home products that don’t tell users what information they’re collecting, don’t require permission to access a user’s contacts or other personal information, and don’t allow the user to opt out of data collection.
The agencies are supposedly worried about “illegal use of facial recognition information in public places, or doing so without securing consent, providing warnings, or protecting biometric data.”
They are supposedly worried about collection of the information of unwary buyers when they shop online.
They are supposedly worried about “illegal collection of personal information by recruiters, transport operators, educational organizations, providers of medical care, and accommodation providers.”
“None of the targets of the campaign are government agencies,” observes The Register, “an unsurprising omission given China conducts pervasive surveillance of its citizens.”
Nor has China told its many cyberhackers to lay off.
Control
Perhaps what explains this enigmatic profession of concern for the privacy of the individual is, paradoxically, the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is determined to control everyone in every way, including by conducting pervasive surveillance. The corollary being that it doesn’t want to share this control with anyone who is not a card-carrying member of the Party or who has not been hired to do privacy-invading work for the Party.
Another possibility is that the CCP couldn’t care less whether anybody in addition to itself also routinely invades the privacy of ordinary citizens but is only pretending to care. Then this campaign to “protect privacy” is simply propaganda intended to convince the Chinese people to the extent possible, maybe not much, that the state truly does attend to them as individuals and not just as serfs or cogs.
Also, the Party likes to be able to cite real-sounding violations of law or at least violations of announced guidelines if and when it wants to target a person for any reason. Perhaps, then, the new push for privacy is simply a way of adding “you violated so-and-so’s privacy, which is strictly forbidden” to the pile of rationales that the Party has on hand for tossing some luckless CEO in prison. Or maybe this rationale is already on the pile and the CCP wants to polish it up a bit. In any case, the more ways people can be said to have violated the law, the easier it will be to cite some violation when it becomes convenient to do so.
What is not happening
And there may be other reasons for the current push. What’s inadmissible as an explanation is the notion that the CCP has suddenly discovered the value of privacy and individual rights and will act to protect these as consistently as possible from now on. The Chinese Communist Party is not turning over a new leaf.
