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ABSTRACT
Autocrats around the world are making unprecedented investments in new, digital surveillance technologies to monitor their societies as well as to identify and repress pockets of dissent. Using an original dataset of local procurement of digital surveillance technologies, merged with micro-data on collective action events, I examine the logic and motivation for the digital surveillance buildup in China, the bellwether of digital dictatorships. I find that localities do indeed tend to allocate increased spending for digital surveillance in response to high volumes of collective action. Why citizens protest appears to be of less concern: protest claims do not have a significant impact on digital surveillance spending. However, how citizens protest makes a great deal of difference: more violent protests prompt significantly higher levels of investment in digital surveillance. This study’s findings have important implications for understanding autocrats’ evolving strategies of control in the digital age.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2024.2326464.
Acknowledgement
I thank Melanie Manion, Timur Kuran, Livia Schubiger, and Adriane Fresh for their support and insights. Hongshen Zhu, Zeren Li, Xiaoshu Gui, Peng Peng, Ying Chi, Griffin Riddler, Emily Myers, and Lucy Right provided valuable feedback on earlier stages of this project. Finally, I thank Ying Chi for her excellent research assistance. All mistakes are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
1. My focus in this study is on dictatorships, but it is worth noting that democracies also use digital repression, often disproportionately against minority populations and protesters (Lee & Chin, Citation2022; Nurik, Citation2022).
2. For a detailed overview on surveillance theory, see Galič, Timan, and Koops (Citation2017).
3. Frantz, Kendall-Taylor, and Wright (Citation2020) illustrates this variation by creating a digital repression index among autocracies that evaluates regimes on several different dimensions, such as a state’s capacity and practices.
4. “On the strengthening of public security video surveillance construction networking application,” National Development and Reform Commission, May 2015.
5. “Provisions of the Central Committee for Comprehensive Management of Social Security on the Implementation of the One-Vote Veto System,” Central Committee, 1992.
6. “National Government Procurement Management Transaction System Construction Master Plan,” February 27, 2013.
7. Beraja, Kao, Yang, and Yuchtman (Citation2023) include four broad categories of contracts in their analysis: “(i) all contracts for China’s flagship surveillance/monitoring projects… (ii) all contracts with local police departments; (iii) all contracts with the border control and national security units; and, (iv) all contracts with the administrative units for domestic security and stability maintenance, the government’s political and legal affairs commission, and various ‘smart city’ and digital urban management units of the government” (12). A definition this broad fails to take into account that many – even a majority – of the contracts associated with entities such as police departments, border control, urban management units, etc. are not related to surveillance at all, and instead are for buying office supplies, hiring assistants, or making improvements to the physical plant.
8. Articles publicizing surveillance projects such as: “Xueliang Project Helps Police Catch Murder Suspect in Li County in 14 Hours” (NetEase, August 10, 2021) appear frequently in the Chinese media. Experts acknowledge that Chinese officials are not trying to conceal the expansion of the domestic surveillance system. For instance, Human Rights Watch writes that “[t]he Chinese government has been upfront about its ambition: that it is developing technologies for mass surveillance and social control” (China Digital Times, September 9, 2019).
9. See reports such as: “Sichuan’s Xueliang Project Eliminates Persistent Rural Security Problems” (Xinhua, January 1, 2017); “Thousands of villages in Sichuan completed the construction of the Xueliang Project” (People’s Government of Sichuan, February 7, 2018).
10. I do, however, replicate my main analyses with the full sample in Appendix 3A.
11. Anhui, Gansu, Hebei, and Yunnan are provinces (sheng 省); Beijing and Tianjin are direct-administered municipalities (zhixiashi 直辖市) that have the same administrative status as provinces.
12. “Gansu Public Security Department ‘Location and Identification’ Basic Information Collection and Maintenance Platform Project” bid award notice, CPGN, January 20, 2021.
13. For more information on the protest data, see: Zhang and Pan (Citation2019). “CASM: A Deep-Learning Approach for Identifying Collective Action Events with Text and Image Data from Social Media.” In: Sociological Methodology 49.1, pp. 1–57.
14. Of the 105 ethnic minority counties in my sample, 6 are in Hebei, 21 are in Gansu, and 78 are in Yunnan.
15. “Cracking Down on Dissent, Russia Seeds a Surveillance Supply Chain,” Aaron Krolik, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, The New York Times, July 6, 2023.
16. “How China Boosts Iran’s Digital Crackdown,” Nima Khorrami, The Diplomat, October 27, 2022.
17. “In Tanzania, Beijing is running a training school for authoritarianism,” Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, Axios, August 21, 2023. The school is a partnership between the CCP and the ruling parties of Tanzania, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, South Africa and Zimbabwe. All six countries are multiparty democracies, but their ruling parties have all ruled continuously for decades.
Additional information
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Viola Rothschild
Viola Rothschild recently completed her PhD in Political Science at Duke University. Her research centers on state-society relations and repression in authoritarian regimes, with a regional focus on China.