China and privacy

A short article at MIT Technology Review tries to make the case that China's "big data" interest in social control may actually be a bit better than the more ultra-local forms of social control they used to be known for:

Better or worse than what?

China’s surveillance culture existed long before the rise of big data. In his book The Government Next Door, Luigi Tomba details how Chinese politics have been micromanaged at the neighborhood level. Residential communities are monitored by neighborhood committees performing semigovernmental functions: reporting dissent, resolving conflicts, and managing both petitions to the government and protests against it. These functions used to be the task of retired elderly women, whom the former Wall Street Journal reporter Adi Ignatius memorably called the “small-feet KGB.” (In traditional China, women had their feet bound at birth.) The question is whether monitoring and repression through impersonal technology is better or worse than these personal intrusions.

One of the most important roles of the small-feet KGB was to enforce China’s one-child policy. The Chinese fertility rate fell dramatically while the policy applied, from 1979 to 2015—a testament to the effectiveness of these personal surveillance tactics.

In ancient China, there was a joint liability system under which three to five households were linked together. If a member of one household committed an offense, all the households were punished. During the Cultural Revolution, punishments for political dissenters were routinely meted out to their immediate family members. The political system compensated for a lack of data on individual activities by deterring dissent broadly and harshly.

Big data would be a threat if Chinese citizens could be expected to have an abundance of political and civil liberties in its absence. But China is a repressive, authoritarian society with or without big data. Technology has made the repression more precise, but precise repression might be an improvement over indiscriminate repression.

The article also talks about how the Chinese have traditionally distrusted privacy as a concept:

One reason Chinese attitudes are different is that as recently as the 1980s, the word “privacy” had negative connotations in China. Chinese norms are anchored in 2,000 years of a Confucian culture that values the intensity of interpersonal relationships. One way to solidify those relationships is through transparency and full disclosure. A circumstance that triggers secrecy is typically an unsavory one. If something is good, why not tell us? Privacy in this context was equated with preserving a dirty secret. To be private was to be antisocial.

 The point is made that the wide surveillance now underway may be changing that.