Inside China's citizen spy networkResume
In China, Big Brother is most definitely watching.
Estimates show up to 16 million Chinese citizens — from university students to taxi drivers — are political informants for the government.
Today, On Point: Inside China's citizen spy network.
Guest
Minxin Pei, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Author of the new book "The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China."
Book Excerpt
Excerpt from "The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China" by Minxin Pei. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Transcript
Part I
NEWS BRIEF: This is the CBS Evening News, Bob Schieffer reporting. And good evening, it is now Sunday morning in Beijing and Chinese army troops have retaken Tiananmen Square where thousands of demonstrators have been camped for the last three weeks. The army moved in with a vengeance at some points firing into the crowd before they actually got to the square. By some counts more than a hundred people are dead, hundreds more are injured.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: 35 years ago this week, June 4, 1989, the Chinese government began its crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests. The protests had began in April 1989, following the death of Hu Yaobang, a former Chinese Communist Party general secretary who had encouraged democratic reforms in the country.
He was forced to resign in 1987. And that further inflamed demand for reforms from university students who were already frustrated with high inflation, corruption, and limits to political freedoms. By spring of 1989, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around China. The focus of the world’s attention was on Beijing. Then, on the night of June 3, the Chinese military made its move on Tiananmen Square.
NEWS BRIEF: The specter of an all-out civil war hovered over the Chinese capital. More civilians died as tanks fired at unarmed civilians in the streets. Some people tried to fight tanks with their hands.
CHAKRABARTI: The Chinese Government claims that roughly 200 individuals were killed that night. But international sources believe the death toll to be much higher.
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Now, 35 years later, China has not seen widespread political protests at the scale of Tiananmen since – though one outlier may be COVID lockdown protests of last year – which we’ll talk about a little later in the show.
But one reason for the suppressed dissent … the Chinese Communist Party has poured vast resources into creating the world’s most comprehensive surveillance state. Between 1991 and 2020 – China’s domestic security spending increased twenty-fourfold.
You’ve likely heard about China’s extensive use of facial recognition technology, DNA record keeping, mobile tracking, even its growing social credit system.
But Minxin Pei says the Chinese government’s most valuable surveillance system isn’t high tech at all. It’s the 16 million Chinese citizens who form a citizen spy network across the country. This very network is what we are going to talk about today.
His new book is The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China. He is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and joins us from Claremont, California. Minxin Pei, to On Point.
MINXIN PEI: Thank you. It's glad to be back.
CHAKRABARTI: So Professor Pei, first and foremost, before we talk about what we don't see in terms of the human spy network, I'd like to just spend a minute talking about what people do think is happening regarding the use of technology in China for surveillance because you open the book with that, about the extensive technology, internet, mobile tracking. Can you describe what a Chinese citizen is likely to experience just walking about the streets of Beijing on a typical day?
PEI: Okay. Based on what I've read, I've not been back to China for about nine years. So if you go, if you're an ordinary citizen, if you go to a shopping mall, the moment you leave your house, the police would know where you are based on your mobile phone.
Incidentally, the mobile phone is now the most used device, both for ordinary people, but also the most monitored device. In China, and if you get into a busy intersection, cameras will capture your facial features and then the information will be sent to a computer system and basically, if the police wants to know who this person is, they can find out. In other words, the police will be able to know where you are if they really want to. Of course, if your name is not on the blacklist, here I have to bring in another aspect of Chinese surveillance not many people know about.
The government keeps about two lists, blacklists of people they want to watch. Altogether, my estimate is about 15 million people they watch. So if you happen to be on that list, then you get real attention. The moment you get on the internet, they would know that you are on the internet. If you fly from Boston to Los Angeles, the moment you land in Los Angeles, the police in Los Angeles would know that somebody on that blacklist has arrived.
CHAKRABARTI: Wow. So there's also, you write, and this is important to note, because it applies also for the citizen surveillance, that not all Chinese people are experiencing the same intensity of constant surveillance, because I do want to make note that early in the book, you reflect on some reporting from the Uyghur autonomous region, saying that the Uyghur minority in China experiences even like a more extreme form of surveillance already.
PEI: Oh, yeah, I think this system targets a select group of people. As we know, if they target everybody, the system breaks down. However potent the system is, it simply cannot cover a majority of the people. China, incidentally, has 1.4 billion people. So the system is effective if the number of people it needs to watch is relatively small, in terms of the percentage of the population.
CHAKRABARTI: It is quite chilling to know that for Chinese Uyghurs, even to just fill up a tank of gas, have to stare into a camera and swipe an ID card so that they're identified as the person filling the gas tank. That's the level of surveillance we're talking about.
PEI: Oh yeah. Let me add one more anecdote.
CHAKRABARTI: Please.
PEI: If you are Uyghur, and now, even if you are Han Chinese, in some, in during certain sensitive periods, in an area where security level is very high, if you want to buy a knife, they, on the knife, they will use laser to imprint your national ID number. So that they would know who actually bought a potential weapon, and if they see a weapon used, they can trace who actually bought it in the first place.
CHAKRABARTI: Now, I wanted to start off with what we know about the use of technology by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil its own citizens. Because of the fact that we know a little bit about it. There has been reporting from reporters outside, not who are not Chinese, who are actually allowed to go, like in some cases, even look at some of the centers in which information is collected. Last year we did a show when we featured a little bit of sound from, I believe it was actually a Vox reporter, who was able to go into one of these centralized locations where a member of the Chinese Communist Party happily showed them the kind of information that they were taking in from folks.
So it's not as if the Chinese government is entirely secretive about its use of technology. Which is interesting, because until the arrival of your book, Professor Pei, I had exactly zero knowledge of the citizen spy network in China. What does it tell you that so little about the use of citizens and human beings as a form of surveillance is known outside of China.
PEI: This is a very sensitive topic. There's not a lot about it. Incidentally, in terms of technology, the Chinese government is very proud of its technological achievements. That's why they would show reporters the kind of gadgets they have, and also technology, at least some part of it, is easy to spot, like the cameras.
The sort of the human side of this system is not well known. As I said, because some of this is quite classified. You just don't have a lot of data. So it took me six years going through vast numbers of official annual reports to piece together the puzzle. The human network actually was set up very early on.
As soon as the Chinese Communist Party took over power in 1949, they began to build this system. So the human, the sort of labor-intensive piece of the Chinese system has a very long history. It's much more developed. So they know how to run this quite well. Incidentally, China did not really have advanced, technologically advanced surveillance system until roughly about 15 years ago.
But the labor-intensive part, the human side of the system, has been in existence for more than 70 years.
CHAKRABARTI: Why was it one of the earliest surveillance actions taken by the Chinese Communist Party, using people?
PEI: Yeah, two explanations. One is that the Chinese Communist Party is very good at organizing.
I think it's probably the party, the ruling party in the world that is unrivaled when it comes to organizing the people. Partly because it's a Leninist party. The party has almost 100 million people. Just think about this. So it has organizational presence everywhere in China.
So that makes the party very effective instrument for organizing the people. So that's one. The other is when China, where the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, the country was very poor. It couldn't get, it did not have the technology. But it had plenty of people. It was a case really of substituting labor for capital and technology.
Incidentally, in the 1980s, based on my research, local Chinese police did not even have cameras to take pictures of the crime scene. So that gives you a sense of how poverty, lack of resources, constrained the Chinese law enforcement and the surveillance system, until after 1989, the system was severely underfunded.
Now the system is very well funded.
CHAKRABARTI: But it is interesting to highlight the fact that from its inception in 1949, China, as you say, the CCP acted as one of its first needs would be to surveil its own people from the beginning.
PEI: Oh absolutely. Oh yeah. Yeah. Because if identified. Yeah. Class enemies as its existential threat.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: First, let me just clarify that there are different levels of informants, different categories. The police recruits, their informants, but the vast number, the numbers that were, I think, have a handle on in terms of its size is recruited by local party organizations.
So who are these? The police tends to recruit individuals that have access to public venue. They can watch the shopping malls. They can know who is going from where to where, based on official sources, the police likes to recruit taxi drivers, delivery people, sanitation workers, you might find, because sanitation workers do a lot of work in public space.
They can watch what's going on. And parking lot attendants, apartment custodians, because they know who gets in and out. So a lot of the informants for police can potentially help police break cases or watch suspects. Now local party organizations recruit a much more varied group of people in universities, for example, recruit students who report on other students, on professors.
Sometimes see if you are a dissident, it's very likely your neighbor, one of your neighbors would be recruited as an informant who might, who will tell the police. The latter category, you can say probably covers everybody or conceivable people who have access to suspects.
CHAKRABARTI: Are the, do the local party officials and the police coordinate in terms of their recruitment?
PEI: No, but I will say, the police, those informants recruited by the police, some information about them is much harder to get, because that's classified. Local party, those recruited by local party organizations, the party, the local governments actually tell you how many recruit, how much work they do.
And in universities, at least when I was doing the research, you could go on their website and they will tell you who would qualify, how they will be rewarded. So the what's surprising is that this latter category ... literally translated as informants.
The government is not really shy about telling you that they are recruiting a very large number of informants among ordinary people to help the party.
CHAKRABARTI: But the implication or the assumption, though, is that these people are willing recruits, but that's not always the case.
PEI: No, I think it's actually quite tricky, because some probably are willing, because you should demonstrate your loyalty.
There are rewards for you, if you're a college student. And you act as informant, you can get party membership, sometimes you get guaranteed admission into prestigious graduate school, schools or programs, probably you might even get a job in a state-owned enterprise after graduation.
There are real political, monetary, whatever, career benefits. But I also believe that some are coerced. Because the party has a lot of leverage over ordinary Chinese citizens. So if you are a taxi driver, if I use that example, your license has to be renewed every year. So if the police comes to you, hey, would you like to sign up here as a potential informant?
Can you say no? If you say no, your license would not be renewed the next year. So this is just a simple example. So that's why if you, I think in the book, there is this puzzle that on paper, China has roughly, based by estimate 15, 16 million people who act as informants.
This category of informants is run by local governments, but when you look at local government reports, how many pieces of information they actually deliver, it turns out that each informant on average delivers point 0.4. pieces of information, which means that roughly 60% actually not performing the role as informants. So how do you explain this puzzle? My explanation is that when the party official, when a party official comes to you and say, would you like to act as informant? You always say no, or you always say yes, because if you say no, then there are consequences.
But a lot of people really don't like the idea of snooping on their neighbors, on their colleagues. So they, even after they sign up, they don't do the kind of spying the government would like them to do.
CHAKRABARTI: What kinds of information are informants, whether willingly or unwillingly recruited?
What kind of information are they expected to deliver?
CHAKRABARTI: Because, thinking about the people you mentioned, delivery people, taxi drivers. Yes. Et cetera. It makes a lot of sense. Because they come in and out of neighborhoods. Yeah, of course. They're a very normal part of a neighborhood's daily functioning.
But they also, those folks have only exterior views into what a person, a family's activities are.
PEI: Okay. So now the police, and that's because they have two separate informants run by local government officials and run by the police. Police, the police, again, this is based on police yearbooks, those run by the police.
Basically, they break them down into threes, in terms of tasks. So taxi drivers, whatever those run by the police, about 10% assigned to infiltrate criminal groups, dissident groups. So these are called case spies. So if the police wants to investigate this group of students, they would recruit a student and send that student into that group.
So about 10%. Then we have about 40% of the informants or spies run by the police. Their job is to watch a given venue, like a library, shopping mall, airport, this train station. So then another 50% collect generic information. So this is about police. Now, in terms of the kind of information they collect, they have three categories. The first category is called enemy intelligence. So if you are this kind of intelligence, information concerns, known dissident groups on the ground, religious groups, terrorists, suspect terrorists. It's only about 3% based on the information reported by local officials.
Then there is a second category. It's about citizen reaction to government policy, to government, to top leadership, to big, major domestic and international events. They call this political intelligence. If I remember correctly, this is about 20% to 30% of the information collected by roughly 16 million people.
And then you have, and the third category is called social intelligence. What is going on in society? Are people talking about the real estate crash, housing prices, unemployment, so on, so forth. So that is about 70%. So in other words, the 60 million people collect mostly information about how Chinese citizens view their government.
It makes sense, because China, so when I looked at their data, I said, wow, my gosh, how come there were so few enemies of the state, because only about 3%. When you think about this, China, for the last, for 40 plus years has been a relatively stable place after Tiananmen, the economy was doing well.
People were more or less content outside the ethnic minority areas. There's not a lot of resistance to authority. So that explains. And the other thing is that if you are an enemy of the state, probably you are very careful. So your activities are not that easy to be found by informants.
CHAKRABARTI: But this is a very important point, right? Because it gets to essentially why the subtitle of your book includes the phrase, the survival of dictatorship in China. Because if so much of this citizen spy network is about giving law enforcement and the Chinese government a sense as to how the Chinese people view their government, that then is an important tool in order for the communist party to know what the right amount of suppression, right, is. Before it becomes just too much for protest and overt objections to the CCP, to boil over.
PEI: Oh, absolutely. I think the system is all about prevention, preemption.
So if they do not care that much about individuals, they worry a lot about trends. If say, from these many cities, they all see that people are complaining about unemployment, then probably they will take some action. So this is, at the beginning of the book, I said there are two kinds of repression.
I'm glad that you started the program, the show with a flashback to June 4th. They learned a lot from the June 4th, June, the Tiananmen Crackdown. Tiananmen Crackdown was very costly for the Chinese government. It killed a lot of people, its reputation was severely damaged, and the party was split. So after June 4th, the government said how can we prevent another June 4th?
And that's why they started doing preventive repression rather than reactive repression. That is, something happens and you have to react and that is very costly.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So then how does what we saw during China's extensive COVID lockdowns, what view does that give us into the limits of the efficacy of this citizen spy network?
Because, as you also write in the book, COVID was a time in which China's use of technology to surveil people, went through the roof, but for some reason, the CCP or President Xi seemed to, I don't know if they just refused to publicly acknowledge the amount of discontent that was building after the months and years.
That Chinese citizens, their movements were so severely restricted until we saw those protests last year.
CHAKRABARTI: Shouldn't they have known? It should have been obvious if their surveillance network was as effective as we're talking about.
PEI: I think one explanation is that China today has effectively one-man rule.
You have Xi Jinping who monopolizes decision making power and in 2022, for all sorts of reasons, he did not want to relax zero COVID. He was going to get his third term at this important party Congress in October. Before that, he did not want the country to descend into some sort of chaos. If there was reopening, COVID infections went out of control. So I think, as a result, the people around him did not want to tell him how bad it was. So I think probably Xi Jinping did not know as he should, the real crisis brewing in the country. As far as COVID, zero COVID was implemented in China.
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You can actually see how effective this system is. They rely most on two instruments, one human, the other is technology. The technology is the mobile phone. They track your mobile phone, all kinds of codes. So if you are remotely close to somebody who's being tested positive, then your code would turn yellow, and you cannot go anywhere.
And so the mobile phone technology was very useful. The other is something called grid management. China has divided its urban neighborhoods, communities, into so called grids. Each grid has about 1,000 people, and each grid has one full time grid attendant, grid manager. During COVID, 1,000 people in an apartment complex would be supervised by one person, so neighborhood committees, so that system enables them to enforce lockdowns.
So these two, now I just want to mention why the protest occurred. The system of surveillance I described does a really good job watching known threats. When you look at who were those protests, they were not on the blacklist. So the system does not do a good job when it does not know who is going to protest.
So that's how, and there were all kinds of reasons to explain why the government was caught flat footed. But after the protest happened, what is notable is that within 48 hours, the protests were crushed. Because the government did react very fast.
CHAKRABARTI: The protests were crushed, clarify that for me, Professor Pei.
PEI: No, they were arrested. Most of the people were arrested.
CHAKRABARTI: They were arrested.
PEI: Yeah, because you know what happened, those protests were smart people. They were young. A lot of them were women. They knew they were going to be subject to facial recognition surveillance. A lot of them took the precaution of wearing hoodies, masks, but one thing they did not know is that they brought their mobile phones.
CHAKRABARTI: Their phones. Yeah.
PEI: So the police based on location data, so they looked at who were in this, in those areas and they visited every one of them.
CHAKRABARTI: But at the same time.
PEI: So that's scary.
CHAKRABARTI: But the CCP also relaxed some of its zero COVID rules thereafter.
PEI: Oh yes, of course. Because after that, there were all sorts of reasons.
The economy was doing very poorly, Xi Jinping did not need to lock down the country. So term actually within a week of the protests, they said no zero COVID and all of a sudden actually were very tragic. The country was not prepared and roughly 1. 5 to 2 million people died.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Pei, in just a minute, of course, I want to, I'm going to want to hear from you the comparisons between China's citizen informant network and others that are well known throughout Western history.
But before we do that, you point out early in the book something very fascinating, that this kind of citizen surveillance comes with a historical Chinese twist, as you call it, that a form of neighborhoods reporting internal activities to higher authorities dates back to what, the 11th century in China?
PEI: Oh, yes, the Song Dynasty.
CHAKRABARTI: Tell me that story.
PEI: Yeah. During the Song Dynasty, there was this prime minister who thought of a scheme to control Chinese people. Chinese rulers throughout history have been obsessed with how to control their population. So he devised a system of say, let us dividing communities into smaller groups.
If you are in this group, in your neighborhood, you will be responsible for your neighbor's behavior. If your neighbor commits a crime, you're going to get punished. So you have an incentive to spy on your neighbor. So that is the basic idea. Of course, in those days, Chinese rulers did not have an organization such as the Communist Party.
So for most part of Chinese history, it was not implemented. That idea was not actually implemented on a nationwide scale until the Communist Party came along.
CHAKRABARTI: Now those small groups, it's just such an interesting history. They were called Bao. Is that right?
PEI: Bao and then Jia. Yeah. Bao is a smaller group.
Jia is a much bigger group. So I don't know. So which town you live in, if it's Watertown or Somerville. Some of you will be divided into several jia. And then your neighborhood of 10, 15 people will be this bao. Because a bao should be small. Otherwise, how can you watch your neighbors? So a bao, probably about 10 family, 10 households will be in one bao.
CHAKRABARTI: The reason why I ask about that is, is the implication there, and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, that there's a long term cultural thread in China of some kind of normalization of surveillance. Or no?
PEI: I think there are two things. This is how I read into this. One is Chinese rulers have been traditionally very fearful of their own people.
So that's why they want to control them. And the other thing is that Chinese rulers throughout history want to use Chinese people against each other. So it's not, I don't know whether it's normal or not, but it's normal for Chinese rulers to turn their own people against each other.
CHAKRABARTI: So the reason why I wanted to ask you that is because you write in the book that by one measure, this network of citizen spies is actually quite effective. Because as you say, it solves the coercive dilemma that any dictatorship has, right, about using force, applying force for control.
And as we talked about earlier, having a good sense of, or thinking that you have a good sense of how the Chinese people think about their government, allows the government to apply just the right amount of force, without doing a Tiananmen style crackdown again. In that sense, is the Chinese Citizen Surveillance Network actually more effective and successful than, say, the ones that maybe Western listeners know more of, such as, the Stasi, for example, or other Eastern Europe police systems?
PEI: Yeah, I would say the Chinese system probably is more effective than Stasi, if some of you are familiar with Stasi. Stasi was a secret police agency in East Germany, other than Stasi, nobody else was doing surveillance. So as far as a ruling party is concerned, it is actually deputizing one bureaucracy, to do a very vital job, and that's too risky.
So in the case of China, surveillance is carried about all kinds of bureaucratic entities. So in other words, you do not empower one particular secret police too much. Because if you empower that too much, then it controls all the information. It has all the agents. It can turn on the party itself.
CHAKRABARTI: That's such an interesting, it's such an interesting contradiction, right? Because the centralized control of the Chinese Communist Party recognizes that bureaucratizing surveillance across different bureaucratic entities across China is a way to not let any one particular group have too much control.
PEI: Yeah, so if you're a smart ruler, you really, incidentally, dictators are overthrown by other dictators. Even though we would like to see some popular uprising overthrowing dictatorships, that's actually a rarity. Most of the time, it's the coups led by their own colleagues that overthrow them.
So that's why they want to be very careful about creating a very powerful secret police agency. So the Chinese system does this. The other is that we need to remember that China, until quite recent, there was a very poor country. If you want to use the police to do that kind of surveillance, you need to have a bigger budget, more people, it's expensive, but if you rely on citizens, then you don't have to pay them, because you can coerce them.
You can use non-monetary rewards to incentivize them.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. The other metric of, quote unquote-effectiveness in the eyes of the CCP, I'd say, and you write about this, is that even though the actual sort of useful information, as you said earlier, may be quite limited.
That's coming from these informants. Does it have the effect of people knowing that they could be informed upon. So it does suppress organization, right?
PEI: Of course, I think as ordinary Americans, if you know that your cell phone is likely to be monitored, probably you're not going to use the cell phone.
You're going to be a lot more careful; I think the knowledge that there is a lot of informants out there, there are a lot of informants out there working for the government could make people much more distrustful of each other, much more careful, and that's all the government need, because if you have a lot of distrust in society, it is very difficult to organize protests, to organize antigovernment activities.
But there's also something that you say that the Chinese government has done very effectively, which I think has a lot of resonance here in the United States. In that you say that the Chinese government has done a very good job at marketing the need for this kind of mass surveillance. As an important part of Chinese stability.
PEI: Oh, absolutely. I think where they've sold this kind of surveillance, is that this is fighting crime. This is for your own safety. People either voluntarily, or unknowingly or cooperatively accept such intrusion. Because if you want to use fear to win, to gain people's support, you're much more likely to succeed.
CHAKRABARTI: That's literally what happened here in the United States with the passage of the Patriot Act, right?
PEI: Oh I think so. Oh, absolutely.
CHAKRABARTI: Following this terrible act of terrorism, we expanded it to an almost unthinkable national security state for the United States and those structures have remained in place ever since 2001, 2002.
PEI: Yeah, yes, I agree. I think the only saving grace in the U.S. is that luckily we still have something called the rule of law, that the judiciary can intervene. The media can't write about this in China. Media cannot report on this. I have to rely on local government's reports to gain the information.
The media cannot really touch such sensitive topics.
CHAKRABARTI: So this gets us to something which I know you're very familiar with, that has been a point of discussion and possibly even hope, right? In Western countries as they view China's development and the system of political power there.
And you remember in the nineties, one of the great arguments for normalizing relations with China was that the growth of the Chinese economy would then naturally open the door for forces of democracy. But obviously, the Chinese government is proving that it is something altogether different.
PEI: Oh, yes. I think when we look at economic development, we look at the positive aspects, wealthy society, more information, more social pluralism, perhaps middle class, better education, all these things go well with a democracy supply in the future. What we do not know is that modernization economic development also allows the Chinese, or dictatorship in this case, the Chinese government, to respond to its threats.
And one of the things it does in response to emerging threats was to use surveillance technology, spying network to ensure that it's control of Chinese society remains as solid as ever.
CHAKRABARTI: But so that leads us to a kind of an interesting observation that you put in the book that China has, and the CCP have proven that in the Chinese context, rapid economic development has only allowed the Chinese government to further surveil its own people and hold onto power.
That's the critical thing. The CCP is still there, whereas all those Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union, their systems of communist rule are gone now. But then it seems as if given that, is the opposite required for democracy to have a chance in China? That is like economic, an economic downturn, a prolonged one.
PEI: Yeah. Yeah. I think now we have to conclude that we've, at least in the case of China, we've given China 20 plus years of experiment with rising prosperity, and it did not turn out well. So we have to think the opposite. And if you look at the history of the fall of dictatorships. They, most of them fall because of economic problems.
Very few fall because of economic success. So I think if you have to bet that whether the loss of legitimacy by China's Communist Party, as a result of poor economic performance will lead to positive political change, I think probably now it has a higher probability than maintaining legitimacy as success, as a result of economic success.
Bringing back to the U.S. context here for just one moment, Professor Pei. Because I'm always aware of them. When we talk about China, there is a sort of an unconscious subtext of saying that's China over there. But the truth is the use of human intelligence, essentially, or citizen spy networks, basically every country that I could think of has done some form of that, at various periods of times in their history.
And I was just thinking, we were talking about 9/11. Thereafter, we learned that the FBI did aggressive outreach to the Muslim American community, all around the United States, trying to recruit people to essentially spy on their own fellow Muslims, like to be spies in mosques around the United States.
And they would sometimes use the same, or at least familiar kinds of either coercion or lures to recruit people to do that, right?
PEI: Oh, yes, absolutely. I think the tactics the Chinese police, the Chinese state uses, are universal tactics. Recruiting informants, watching certain venues.
In the book, so there's a chapter on how the Chinese government watches universities, monasteries, what in the U.S., we call them high crime areas, intensifies surveillance there as well. I think there is one crucial difference that is, thank God, we still have a civil society, free press, some recourse to the legal system to expose and constrain potential abuses by the police.
CHAKRABARTI: Just as a quick final thought, Professor Pei, you said you haven't been back to China in nine years.
PEI: Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: Do you mind if I ask if there's a particular reason for that or is just that life is keeping you here in the United States?
PEI: Yeah, because I've been very critical in my writings, my research, so I did not feel safe after my last visit.
I'm not on the blacklist, at least I do not know that, but I don't want to risk. And of course, after writing this book, certainly, I don't want to use myself as a test case to see how effective the surveillance system is. (LAUGHS)
CHAKRABARTI: Very well understood, Professor. You said that after your last visit, you didn't feel safe in China.
Was there something that happened?
PEI: No, it's just, you could feel it sometimes, people are much less willing to talk. In fact, social control is such, as a academic, why should I waste my time if I cannot really do real research? The book is based almost 100% on open-source research. So have to go to libraries, dig up all kinds of local reports, go on the internet, look for database. So that's how the book was done, by interviewing policemen. Say, Hey, tell me how you actually spy on Chinese people.
This program aired on June 6, 2024.
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