Angry in the Great White North

The New York Times is reporting on China's latest effort to suppress and control its population:

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

You might think that this is George Orwell's 1984 coming about 20 years later, but though a lot of people recall, or have heard second-hand, of the control systems put in place by The Party in Oceania, the details are significantly different.

In China, the control system is aimed at the lower classes, especially the migrant workers.

This is direct contrast to Oceania, the fictional superstate in Orwell's dystopia. In that nightmare, telescreens and other control measures were aimed at members of the party, comprising of about 15% of the population. This includes the 2% of the population that belonged to the Inner Party. The other 85% of the population, the proles, were almost entirely unmonitored. Some agents of the Thought Police (Thinkpol) would look for proles who looked like they were rising about the general level of stupidity that marked that stratum of society (those individuals would be marked for elimination), but by and large, the proles were left alone. A steady supply of cheap alcohol and pornography kept them distracted enough to keep the from being a threat to The Party.

The true danger to The Party came from within The Party itself. The Party monitored itself for thought crimes.

I have no doubt the Chinese security aparatus keeps tabs on party members. But if we've learned anything from the recent incidents of Chinese export problems, high level Chinese officials spend years taking bribes without consequence, at least not until a problem becomes an embarrassment and a scapegoat is needed.

On the other hand, we are learning that face-recognition and advanced data tracking are being applied to the equivalent of Orwell's proles.

I find the difference interesting, and I'm not sure what it means. Is China like Orwell's Oceania, but applying it's surveillance and enforcement effort at the wrong target? Does this mean the Chinese Communist Party will one day fall prey to an attack from within?

Or is China not like Oceania, despite the surface similarities? In that case, does it also make sense that the true threat to the Chinese Communist Party will come from elsewhere?

The student protests of 1989 in Tiananmen Square would seem to support that the threat comes from beyond the boundaries of party membership. But then one of the reasons the students were as successful as they were was that Zhao Ziyang, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, was sympathetic to their cause. When he spoke to them, he told them that he and his colleagues were old and so "it didn't matter to us anymore".

Well, for a dictator, power always matters, to the very end.

Zhao was one of the first to advocate for the loosening of state control, and for the separation of the party from the state, taboo topics even today, and he was talking about this back in 1980s.

Had China's Thinkpol eliminated Zhao back then, hardliners might have moved more quickly in 1989, and the threat to the Communist Party's control might not have been so severe.

So maybe the real threat to the Chinese Communist Party is from within after all.

Most of the anger that drive the students in 1989, and that drives frustration among the working class in China today, is rooted in disgust at the corruption that is endemic inside the party. Nothing suggests that corruption has done anything except grow worse.

George Orwell understood that foe the dictatorship to survive, it had to ruthlessly deal with failures exhibited by The Party membership.

Instead of following Oceania's lead, though, the Chinese government is taking a different approach. Keep the people under control while the party membership enirches itself. It is worth noting that the material quality of life from both Inner and Outer Party officials in Orwell's 1984 was only marginally better than that of the proles. In modern China, corrupt officials live high on the hog, and everyone knows it, and hates it.

And that gives me hope that one day China might actually be free.