Living with Digital Surveillance in China

Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
	Digital surveillance in China
	Analytical lens and methods
	Epistemic positioning
	Core arguments
	Structure of the book
Part I Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
	1 Privacy and surveillance
		Privacy
		Surveillance
		Surveillance on a continuum between care and control
		Perceptions of privacy and surveillance
	2 Surveillance in China: from Dang’an and Hukou to the social credit systems
		Personal and household registers
		Social governance in the 21st century
		Bottom-up and top-down approaches: grid management and the golden shield
		The social credit systems
		Current status of data centralisation and algorithmic sorting in China
Part II Anguishing narratives of moral shortcomings
	3 Rules and monitoring will raise people’s ‘moral quality’
		The rhetoric of rules and punishment in Chinese society
		Rules and punishment as tools for moral progress
		The civilising power of technology-enforced rules
	4 National humiliations and the civilisation dream
		Saving China’s national face: the dialectics of pride and shame
		The dreams
	5 Saving face: privacy as hiding shameful information
		Privacy imaginaries
		What do you hide? Privacy as the saving of face and social respectability
		Who do you hide from? Parents and supervisors, not the government
Part III Redeeming narratives of digital protection
	6 The government as protection and order
		China is not an ordinary country: it is the Middle Kingdom
		Government as parental protection: surveillance as care
		Democracy: ‘the government is by the people’
	7 Technology as a magic bullet
		Convenience in every aspect of life
		Love of technology
		The moral function of technology
		Technology will give China its due place in the world
		The darker side of technology: opacity
Part IV The mental and emotional weight of surveillance
	8 Mental tactics to dissociate oneself from surveillance
		Brushing surveillance aside: minimising, ignoring, normalising, and reframing surveillance
		Othering surveillance targets
		Wearing blinders: ‘so far, it has not harmed me’
		Resorting to fatalism: ‘It does not matter’
	9 Misgivings and objections
		Awareness and unpleasant feelings
		Behaviours to limit surveillance exposure
		Marginal but elaborate objections to generalised surveillance
		Generalised surveillance of everybody versus being singled out
		Disconnect between narratives on surveillance and emotional reactions to it
	10 Self-censorship
		Interviewing at the margin of politics
		Self-censorship in action
Conclusion
	Implications for Chinese studies: how may the unstable equilibrium shift in the future?
	Implications for surveillance studies in other contexts
Appendix: Methods
	Recruitment of the interview research participants
	Interview guide
	Interpreters’ training
	Diary of observation data
	Research data analysis
Bibliography
Index