China's Big Data

Published December 20, 2024

Photographer: Nicholas

In Chinese, the term is tiān wǎng (天网), part of a saying from Tao Te Ching, “the heaven’s net has wide meshes, but nothing escapes it.” The general idea is that the guilty cannot escape the impersonal agent of law and order in the universe (‘heaven.)

If anything on earth has come close to realizing this vision of total surveillance, it is indeed China’s 700 million-camera system – one for every two citizens. The facial recognition system used to analyze the images captured by these cameras has been accused of being used to target members of the Uighur minority, with one million arrested on questionable charges, according to a UN report. One database from Chinese biometric company SenseNets Technology that was leaked in 2019 showed that 6.7 million GPS coordinates had been logged on individuals in hotels, parks, and mosques, even including data on newborns.

China’s surveillance state is an obvious departure from the global norm, to the extent that there is one. In 2024, the UN Human Rights Council attempted to set international standards on surveillance, declaring that it “must only be conducted when it is the only means of achieving a legitimate aim, or, when there are multiple means, it is the means least likely to infringe upon human rights.” To date, no state government has signed the document, even though it’s drawn support from companies, experts, and elected officials.

Even by authoritarian standards, China’s surveillance program has far surpassed its peers in sheer size, using camera numbers as a proxy. Russia has one million surveillance cameras, a part of a formidable domestic spying regime to be sure, but well below China’s camera-to-citizen ratio; the only available total for North Korea puts the number at comparatively low 100,000 cameras.

In the digital era, human rights concerns over surveillance are linked to the closely related concept of data privacy. International norms prioritize privacy and emphasizes government restraint. As the World Bank puts it, “In general, personal information should be lawfully obtained (usually through freely given consent) for a specific purpose, and not be used for unauthorized surveillance or profiling by governments or third parties or used for unconnected purposes without consent (unless otherwise required under the law).”

China’s surveillance program is at odds with such norms and values.

However, that’s not how Chinese themselves see it. As Josh Chin and Liza Lin, the authors of the recent book, Surveillance State, discovered, it’s not that the Chinese don’t have a concept of data privacy; it’s that they interpret it in radically different ways. Chinese views on data collective hinge on who has it: when it comes to private corporations, as opposed to the state, their concerns over privacy are amplified – hence recent Chinese laws that penalize corporations for failing to prevent security breaches or obtain user consent (the Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law in 2021).

In their book, Chin and Lin describe how the Chinese government has crafted a new social contract with its citizens, using their personal data to build the society they want. Data privacy has been redefined to be collectivist rather than individualistic, as the West understands it.

From security and safety to public health, Chinese citizens seem increasingly open to state data collection and use. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, China ramped up its digital surveillance capacities using CCTV cameras, drones, and mobile phone data to create one of the world’s most extensive and aggressive virus-tracking systems.

China’s COVID-19 lockdowns had its share of dissenters and protesters, but it also had the consent, albeit passive, of many Chinese people. One Weibo user reportedly captured the sentiment of many in commenting, “[W]hen personal safety is at stake, it [giving up the right to privacy] becomes a way to control [the outbreak of the pandemic].”

However, as Chin and Lin note, for every seemingly benevolent use of Chinese surveillance capabilities, there are more nefarious consequences. The same system that makes cities safer also made possible the wrongful imprisonment of half a million minority Muslims. Even the seeming good uses must be weighed against the consequences: China’s COVID-19 contract tracing may have saved millions of lives but came at a tremendous cost to personal liberties. There are other risks to China’s SkyNet too. In 2022, a hacker gained access to a database containing the personal information of a billion Chinese – about 70% of the population – and threatened to sell it for $200,000 in Bitcoin.

For now, the future of true data privacy in China appears dim. China has struck a social contract with its citizens which tilts in favor of social order, away from freedom. For the rest of the world, however, China’s surveillance social contract poses a series of urgent questions: Where are other governments willing to draw the line between personal privacy and collective goods, like security or public health? Is the concept off data privacy necessarily individualistic rather than collective?

China may be a lesson in how the social contract can be revised to write out personal freedom and data privacy, but it is also a lesson in the need for a social contract in the first place – a shared understanding between citizens and their governments on the uses and limits of surveillance and the value placed on data privacy in striking a balance between the two.