Minxin Pei's New Book

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L Gordon Crovitz, China's Citizen Spies; A vast network of informants may be the regime's most effective tool of repression. Wall Street Journal, Feb 24, 2024, at page C7.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/ ... izen-spies-e2a95bd8
(book review on, Minxin Pei, The Sentinel State; Surveillance and the survival of dictatorship in China. Harvard University Press, Feb 13, 2024_

Note:
(a)
(i) This article is free.  
(ii) The Sentinel State  哨兵国家

(b) "Mr Pei details a surveillance system aimed at 'preventative repression.' Among its strategies is a 'social credit' system [社会信用体系] in which citizens are given points for what they say, whom they meet and where they go online * * * Mr Pei's chronicle ranges across recent Chinese history—from Mao's China to the post-Tiananmen Square period (when the party launched programs such as Strengthening Comprehensive Social and Public Order Management [关于加强社会治安综合治理的决定 (1991)]) to the increasingly oppressive watchfulness of Xi Jinping's regime today. * * * details the police bureaucracies that operate their own surveillance: the Domestic Security Protection unit of the Ministry of Public Security * * * The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission—the organization that both monitors citizen’s ideological compliance and coordinates the security agencies—was temporarily abolished in the reform period before Tiananmen Square but is now run by a Politburo member. It oversees domestic security * * *"
(i)
(A) preventive repression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_repression
(B) 'Preventive' or 'Preventative'?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/ ... ive-or-preventative
(ii) Domestic Security Protection Bureau of Ministry of Public Security (MPS)  公安部 国内安全保卫局 (国保) is the former name (1998-2020) of MPS's Political Security Protection Bureau 政治安全保卫局.
(iii) Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission  中共中央政法委员会 (abbreviation: 中央政法委)

(c) "In a continuation of Mao's focus on the 'mass line' [群众路线]—here meaning relying on the masses to monitor dissent and potential counterrevolutionaries—it is now a central responsibility of the local police to recruit informants, Mr Pei says."

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It’s no secret that China’s government keeps tabs on people it considers potential threats to the regime. Facial-recognition scanners, DNA samples and government-monitored mobile phones are the best-known means by which Chinese citizens—and increasingly anyone anywhere—are surveilled by Beijing. What has been a state secret is that the world’s most advanced technologies are not the most important tool that the Chinese Communist Party uses to maintain order.

As Minxin Pei explains in “The Sentinel State,” the most effective methods to monitor Chinese citizens are deployed not by machines or computer code but by other Chinese citizens: a vast network of informants mobilized by government agencies at the national, provincial and local levels. The numbers are so vast, and the structure so well-organized, that this “analog surveillance state,” as Mr. Pei calls it, ensures “the survival of the world’s most powerful one-party dictatorship.”

Understanding how China’s rulers stay in power is essential for anyone—within China or without—looking for ways to undermine the country’s ruling party. But the very potency of the state’s monitoring apparatus makes it hard to pursue a campaign to counter the dictatorship. Mr. Pei details a surveillance system aimed at “preventative repression.” Among its strategies is a “social credit” system in which citizens are given points for what they say, whom they meet and where they go online.

Mr. Pei’s impressive research includes his examination of hundreds of official and leaked government documents as well as his interviews with dissidents who offer accounts of the surveillance they have been subjected to. He tracks the growth in informants over time and describes the ways in which agencies and police departments in China have been restructured to give more emphasis to the monitoring of citizens. Mr. Pei’s chronicle ranges across recent Chinese history—from Mao’s China to the post-Tiananmen Square period (when the party launched programs such as Strengthening Comprehensive Social and Public Order Management) to the increasingly oppressive watchfulness of Xi Jinping’s regime today.

“Amid economic growth that, theoretically, should have facilitated liberalization or even democratization,” Mr. Pei writes, referring to the economic vitality that began with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s, “the party-state has endured.” The reason, he says, is that the Communist Party “possesses the most capable surveillance infrastructure ever known.” He estimates that China’s economic growth helped to fund a more than 20-fold increase in spending on domestic security between 1991 and 2020.

Among Mr. Pei’s eye-opening findings is that an average of 1.13% of Chinese citizens—up to 16 million people—are political informants each year, in line with the percentage of East Germans that the Stasi recruited before the fall of the Berlin Wall but on a vaster numerical scale, given the size of China’s population. “A society shot through with informants will be riven by distrust, eroding the foundations of democracy and market economics, its frequent companion,” Mr. Pei writes. “Social trust is the bedrock of collective action and therefore, in a dictatorship, to be feared. Political spying thus kills two birds with one stone: it identifies potential threats to the regime, and it sows distrust among the population.”

Informants in businesses, banks and universities—and among internet providers, taxi drivers and delivery services—enable the party to promote loyalists and spot potential critics. Some universities maintain an “opinion informant” in every classroom. Mr. Pei estimates that up to 13 million Chinese are now under active surveillance.

Informants are managed by what Mr. Pei calls “the Leninist regime’s organizational presence at the grassroots level and its control of access to resources and opportunities.” The result is a system that “even the Stasi would envy.” There are 97 million members of the Communist Party, with five million local branches. Mr. Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, details the police bureaucracies that operate their own surveillance: the Domestic Security Protection unit of the Ministry of Public Security; a matrix of local police stations; and provincial and municipal security bureaus.

The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission—the organization that both monitors citizen’s ideological compliance and coordinates the security agencies—was temporarily abolished in the reform period before Tiananmen Square but is now run by a Politburo member. It oversees domestic security, supervises the courts, sets priorities for crackdowns on dissent, and makes investments in high-tech surveillance systems.

Mr. Pei accessed police records to sample the commission’s local work. A typical week for a district in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, included investigating fraud on an online fundraising platform; tracking military veterans who were planning an event that could trigger unrest; and keeping tabs on various labor-management disputes at two local companies. The commission issued daily reports on protesters and investigated the backgrounds of two citizens who had applied for jobs, to make sure they weren’t members of “evil cults.”

In a continuation of Mao’s focus on the “mass line”—here meaning relying on the masses to monitor dissent and potential counterrevolutionaries—it is now a central responsibility of the local police to recruit informants, Mr. Pei says. Local police also persecute ethnic minorities and intimidate dissidents and members of disfavored religions, including through regular “door knocking” home visits.

If China’s system of well-organized, human-led surveillance, enhanced by technology, accounts for the party’s tight control over power, what could loosen its grip? Mr. Pei concludes that the first step must be with “political reforms that uproot Leninist institutions, not with economic liberalization and modernization.” The effectiveness of the party’s organization makes the likelihood of political reform seem remote, though an economic downturn could weaken party controls.

Beijing’s surveillance beyond its borders is largely outside the scope of “The Sentinel State.” Still, it is worth noting that China can apply its surveillance program overseas, bringing it to bear on millions of Americans, including military officials and tech executives whose records Beijing has hacked. Ethnic Chinese are already tracked wherever they live—by Beijing’s “police stations” in Chinatowns around the world and by modern Red Guards who are harassing Hong Kong refugees in the U.K.

The Communist Party’s reliance on surveillance for its survival leaves the U.S. with a wide surveillance gap with China. For good reasons, the U.S. can’t mimic China by perfecting surveillance tools domestically that it can then use against foreigners. Democracies don’t recruit one in every 100 citizens as political informants or surveil citizens to determine their social credit score. All the more need, then, for the U.S. to defend its citizens from surveillance by China—including by developing its own surveillance technologies, with help from Silicon Valley, to target Chinese agents. The enormousness of the challenge is made vividly clear in Mr. Pei’s disturbing account.

Mr. Crovitz, a former publisher of the Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, is co-CEO of NewsGuard.