A woman is posing for a photo with the Hong Kong Skyline at Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong on June 2, 2024. Estimates show up to 16 million Chinese citizens — from university students to taxi drivers — are political informants for the government.Excerpt from"The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China" by Minxin Pei. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.NEWS BRIEF: This is the CBS Evening News, Bob Schieffer reporting.
Now, 35 years later, China has not seen widespread political protests at the scale of Tiananmen since – though one outlier may be COVID lockdown protests of last year – which we’ll talk about a little later in the show. His new book is The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China. He is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and joins us from Claremont, California. Minxin Pei, to On Point.
CHAKRABARTI: Wow. So there's also, you write, and this is important to note, because it applies also for the citizen surveillance, that not all Chinese people are experiencing the same intensity of constant surveillance, because I do want to make note that early in the book, you reflect on some reporting from the Uyghur autonomous region, saying that the Uyghur minority in China experiences even like a more extreme form of surveillance already.
So it's not as if the Chinese government is entirely secretive about its use of technology. Which is interesting, because until the arrival of your book, Professor Pei, I had exactly zero knowledge of the citizen spy network in China. What does it tell you that so little about the use of citizens and human beings as a form of surveillance is known outside of China.
But the labor-intensive part, the human side of the system, has been in existence for more than 70 years. So who are these? The police tends to recruit individuals that have access to public venue. They can watch the shopping malls. They can know who is going from where to where, based on official sources, the police likes to recruit taxi drivers, delivery people, sanitation workers, you might find, because sanitation workers do a lot of work in public space.
PEI: No, but I will say, the police, those informants recruited by the police, some information about them is much harder to get, because that's classified. Local party, those recruited by local party organizations, the party, the local governments actually tell you how many recruit, how much work they do.