What I'm reading: China

Long Ling, 'Diary: In the new Beijing'. London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 6 · 3 April 2025

For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’

Howard W. French: 'Toffler in China'. New York Review of Books, 10 April 2025

How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.

The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology.