Living in a dystopia: China's surveillance state

Caden Herron - Junior | News

The concept of a dystopian society is familiar to most of us, but we understand it as just a concept -- an idea of something that could happen but hasn’t. However, residents of China live as close to this reality as can be imagined.

Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has been developing a social credit system in which individual citizens are scrutinized for their political opinions, social media comments and posts, and consumer habits. On top of this, the CCP has been amassing the world's largest video surveillance system, utilizing both facial recognition and mass data gathering.

Chinese citizens live out the majority of each day under the close observation of their government via video cameras. In 2018, these cameras numbered close to 200 million, and according to Thomas Ricker, deputy editor for The Verge, “China’s installed base is expected to rise to over 560 million cameras by 2021.”

The 170 million video cameras in 2018 meant one camera per 8 citizens. If 560 million are implemented by this year, that number will increase to one per 3 citizens.

These cameras utilize facial recognition software to match a citizen's photo to a national ID database. If a citizen performs any type of offense, even jaywalking, the event can be recorded and consequences dealt out.

The Chinese Government, in conjunction with building the massive surveillance system, has been working on a project titled “Golden Shield.” According to Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond, writers for The Atlantic, the project will create a streamline system, “allowing easy access to local, national, and regional records on each citizen.”

These records include level of education, place of residence, profession, license plate, religion, and any other data that can be found on an individual.

The data gathered on the individual citizens will be used to create a citizen’s score. This score will be reminiscent of a Fair Isaac Corporation score, but based on much more information. While a FICO score is calculated based on credit data to determine how likely someone is to repay a loan, the citizen score may track consumer habits, social media posts and messages, and legal records. The citizen score determined represents how trustworthy a person is, according to the government.

In the US, the privacy of citizens is valued greatly. Any attempts by the government to encroach on this privacy are met with fierce opposition of the citizens. In China, however, the information barrier and censorship of ideas and beliefs mean that the citizens don’t understand what they trade in return for a seemingly “safer” society.

The Chinese society today resembles a dystopian world more closely that any other in the world. Is this society therefore the worst to live in, or is this course of action creating a truly safer society for those who live in it?