“In some dark places it is a crime for a firefly to glow.”
Zijuan Chen
A film made by documentary filmmaker Zhang Jialing called Total Trust: Surveillance State was shown on BBC 4 on Tuesday, and even for those of us somewhat familiar with what is happening in China it made for sobering viewing.
It also raised uncomfortable questions perhaps about where some people in the West might wish our societies to go.
Described variously as “terrifying” and “compelling”, the film tells the stories of Zijuan Chen whose husband, Weiping Chang, a lawyer, was arrested in 2020 and been held incommunicado since; Wenzu Li and her husband Quanzhang Wang who was released from prison after being held since 2015; and Sophia Xueqin Huang a journalist who was in contact with other dissidents but has herself since been arrested.
Weiping Chang’s offence was to have assisted people in presenting petitions of complaint to the authorities. This is almost the only means of attempting to influence the Communist Party state and it is strongly discouraged and punished. Among those who he helped were villagers whose homes had been destroyed as part of the building of “new cities.” Dystopian projects that are participated in by western investors.
Weiping was first arrested in December 2019 when he met with three friends to discuss human rights issues. He was first held under “residential surveillance” before being taken into police custody. He had already been tortured prior to his residential detention and received permanent injuries to his hands when he was subjected to the rack.
In a video diary he made in the house, Weiping described the role of modern technology in the suppression of the Chinese people. “Big data knows all your actions. Big data makes totalitarianism easier.” He was sentenced to three years and six months at his trial at Feng in June 2023.
In her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capital Shoshana Zuboff noted that after the Chinese Communist Party had “dismantled traditional domains of affiliation, identity, and social meaning – family, religion, civil society, intellectual discourse, political freedom” they needed to replace it with something. Collectivism based on fear ironically destroys all spontaneous community.
That something has been a certain level of material prosperity, in the cities at least, but the iron behind the velvet remains the power to monitor and control every aspect of each person’s life. Technology provides the means to allow the state to have less recourse to raw violence although that is never far from the surface as dissidents and entire national groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans know only too well.
The tech linchpin is facial recognition which allows the state to monitor everyone almost all of the time. To the extent where one promotor boasted of how cameras can read an employee’s expression and allow the company to address the issue. The technology allows the ‘emotibots’ to identify a wide range of emotions from happiness to anger, from confusion to fear and disgust. Another thought all this a sign of “how society is progressing.”
The most heavily monitored areas are called “sharp eye neighbourhoods.” These are home to some 170 million cameras already in place with another 400 million on stream. All of which makes the fantasy of Solzhenitsyn’s Stalinist prison guards in The First Circle that they could recognise a person from a taped phone call suddenly the least of anyone’s worries.
How this operates was shown by the neighbours of Quanzheng Wang and Wenzu Li being able to watch them all the time, and to demand to know who was visiting them, and to barricade them into their apartment on “politically sensitive days.” One neighbour had a camera installed that could watch their comings and goings.
To further their isolation, the state was also able to get Tik Tok to remove videos which they had uploaded. Yes, that Wokey Tik Tok.
None of this would be possible without human agency. The foot soldiers of the Communist Party are the neighbourhood committees and are overseen by a grid officer with responsibility for reporting on everything the 400 households in their grid get up to. There are over four million such voluntary spies.
One was filmed asking an elderly woman why she had walked to a trash can. Another grid officer said that they had lists of “special residents to watch out for” and to report on to “higher government.” All of this feeds into determining a person’s Social Credit rating which is key to their status and indeed the status of family and friends in socialist China.
The Social Credit rating ranges over 1000 points, with points being awarded for good deeds and deducted for bad ones. Now, some of the good deeds and bad deeds are what we would also recognise as socially beneficial on the one hand, or anti-social on the other. Volunteering to help the old earns points, being pissed and abusive on the train is a negative.
However, the main point of the exercise is to ensure that citizens are obedient, and above all do not question the authority of the Communist Party. Above all, not to challenge the vastly wealthy class of capitalists who do not have to worry about trade unions and such like. General Secretary Xi himself is reputed to be worth several billion dollars.
All of that is attractive to both a certain type of person of wealth and a certain type of leftist. We have seen that in the nexus between the billionaire foundations and the NGO and activist political left. The same elements were among the greatest enthusiasts for the restrictions that most western states imposed during the Covid Panic.
We noted before that not only did sections of the left in Ireland enjoy the power that the state was able to command during that period, but they were mostly advocates of power being extended. Many of them believed that the power ought to be retained even after the panic ended, and extended to other goals they had, notably restrictions on activities deemed to be exacerbating climate change.
The excuse is irrelevant. What matters to the totalitarian mind is the power to control, not the ends to which that control is allegedly exercised in pursuit of. It is still argued that the “ideals” of the totalitarian left are somehow an excuse for the hundreds of millions murdered and many more consigned to state slavery.
No one excuses the horrors of Nazism on the basis of their “ideals” and they were little different other than they had different hate figures and different absurdities to justify killing and enslaving people to make them better.
The founders of the Chinese Communist Party may have set out as ascetic fanatics who would have been happy to have everyone living in communes on rice. Their successors are a class which live the lives of Roman Emperors. What unites them is their connection to the Party and its army and secret police and millions of informers who allow them to consign hundreds of millions of people to a condition in which personal freedom barely exists anymore.
Norman Mailer once said that if fascism ever came to the United States that it would have a smiley face.
Our aspirant totalitarians will argue that they need to be allowed control your life in order to eliminate CO2 emissions, or housing lists, or racism, or transphobia. They will be happy to use any excuse and any means. The Chinese Communist Party has shown them how it can be accomplished and the CCP is happy to assist them in that pursuit.
Bees and ants may be happy in their own way and will collectively destroy the odd bee who engages in anti-social activity. That has ever been the “ideal” of the totalitarian left.
China is where all that ends. But it will only end there if the west returns to its own founding traditions based on personal freedom, respect for individuals as ends not means, and the exercise of free will and the personal responsibility that goes with that. Unless we prefer to live like the human ants and bees of China.