“Digital
control in China operates as a dual-use technology — repressive in a
security sense but progressive from a socialist one,” says the author of
“Retrofitting Leninism: Participation Without Democracy in China.” “On
the one hand, it serves a conventional coercive function by keeping tabs
on 1.4 billion people and letting them know it. On the other, it
facilitates public polling, responsiveness, oversight and probabilistic
forecasting enabled by massive caches of aggregated data on individual
and group-level behavior.”
For
Gueorguiev, this attentive authoritarianism brings to mind the
Australian scholar John Keane’s observation that “China’s leaders are so
fearful of the loss of control that comes along with democracy that,
paradoxically, they act like elected officials in the West who
constantly plumb the public mood in the hope of winning the proverbial
ballot.”
As
George Yeo, the former foreign minister of Singapore, once put it to
me, digital connectivity solves the age-old problem that historically
plagued China’s institutional civilization: poor “ground-reality”
feedback reaching the imperial center because of too many layers in
between. Today’s technologies that are both symbiotic and adversarial,
he says, enable “tiào,” a Chinese word which, in this context, means
continuous tuning of a complex system.
Gueorguiev
goes on: “Smartphones and facial recognition, for instance, make it
near impossible for dissidents or protesters to organize; they also make
it easier to fine jaywalkers or redirect traffic in case of a jam.
Public complaints about corruption can be weaponized for political
purges, but they are also a tool against self-serving officials who
embezzle or waste public funds. Social credit scores will help the state
coerce a preferred form of citizenship, but they also help alleviate
mistrust and risk in China’s unruly consumer market.”
In
other words, China’s densely wired society is a two-way platform. While
the state monitors from above — surveillance — connectivity also
enables the public to monitor the state and the market from below —
“sousveillance.”
We
in the West are not wrong to suspect that an unprecedented 21st-century
techno-totalitarianism is taking shape in China. But to dismiss the
inclusive and adaptive nature of connectivity with Chinese
characteristics risks misreading the sustainability of the system. To
the extent the Party-state remains responsive to the public mood and
concerns gathered from ubiquitous monitoring, a kind of systemic
accountability perpetually refreshes its own legitimacy.
As
in all else, everything depends on the balance. President Xi Jinping’s
over-suppression may well undo what has worked so far for China. The
system will surely falter and fail in the future if repression displaces
adaptation and if authority is enforced from the top instead of
legitimated by inclusiveness from below.