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FOREIGN TECHNOLOGY AND THE SURVEILLANCE STATE
Dahlia Peterson
The Chinese party-state has long practiced mass surveillance. Since 1949, it has relied on information gathering and social control tools, such as danwei (单位) work units, the hukou (户口) residency registration system, and dang’an (档案) secret political files, to monitor people and maintain tight social control.1 But mass migration and privatization as a result of economic reforms after 1978 have undermined the efficacy of these older practices.2 The 1989 democracy protests and the following bloody crackdown jolted the party-state leadership into realizing that it must strengthen surveillance over an increasingly mobile and demanding society. The fast rise of the Internet, and people’s ...
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