The Surveillance State in China Began With Mao Says Minxin Pei

I think a powerful surveillance apparatus will continue to be a major obstacle to the development of democratic forces, but it will not be the decisive factor.

Minxin Pei

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Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. His most recent book is The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• What is a Surveillance State - 2:55
• Informants - 12:02
• History - 23:43
• Surveillance and Elites - 35:26

Key Links

The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China by Minxin Pei

"Why China Can’t Export Its Model of Surveillance" by Minxin Pei in Foreign Affairs

"Totalitarianism’s Long Shadow" by Minxin Pei in Journal of Democracy

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Josh Chin on China’s Surveillance State

Deng Xiaoping is Not Who You Think He is. Joseph Torigian on Leadership Transitions in China and the Soviet Union

More Episodes from the Podcast

More Information

Apes of the State created all Music

Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com

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Transcript

About this time last year, I talked to Josh Chin. He’s a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the coauthor of the book Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control. He argued China’s use of surveillance is more than a tool to control its population. It has become a defining feature of its political regime. But Josh is not a political theorist. He’s a journalist, so he focused more on his experiences in reporting on China.

Still, the idea of China as a surveillance state has caught on among those studying China. Minxin Pei is among those who agree. He is widely known as one of the most influential voices in the study of China. He is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. His most recent book is The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.

Our conversation reflects on the implications of what it means to describe China as a surveillance state. We talk about how China developed its surveillance infrastructure and how it has changed over time. This is an important conversation with one of the most well-respected scholars on the politics of China.

The podcast is sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website.

For those following the podcast closely, the show will have even more sponsors and partners in the next few months. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. You can also support the podcast with a 5 star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The show needs just 4 more ratings to reach 100, so we’re really close to a milestone.

But for now… here is my conversation with Minxin Pei…

jmk

Minxin Pei, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Minxin Pei

Thank you for having me.

jmk

Well, Minxin, I absolutely loved your book, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China. It touches on a theme that we've begun to really hear about a lot more lately. For instance, I think I talked to Josh Chin probably about a year ago. We talked about the idea of China being a surveillance state. But he approaches things a lot differently than you do. He's much more of a journalist working for The Wall Street Journal. Your book really took that idea and gave it a much broader theoretical framework.

So, just to start out by trying to wrap our heads around this idea of the surveillance state, can you explain the difference between what a surveillance state and maybe an authoritarian state that conducts widespread surveillance? What's the difference between something that's defined by surveillance and an authoritarian state that just conducts a lot of surveillance?

Minxin Pei

There's a fundamental difference between surveillance in a democratic society and surveillance in an authoritarian society or authoritarian state. In an authoritarian state, surveillance is explicitly, and in most cases, political. That is the purpose is not crime control or public safety or in the case of a capitalist society, for profit activities. In an authoritarian state, the primary goal of surveillance is to monitor the activities of known or suspected political threats. That can include a lot of people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens, who do nothing except some kind of expression, which the regime does not like, because in an authoritarian society the overriding imperative is to stay in power and the ultimate guarantor is the use of violence.

But the use of violence is quite expensive. You kill people, you lock up people, and you scare away investors. Regimes that rely on sheer brutality actually do not do well. So how do you stay in power without bankrupting yourself? That's where surveillance, or political surveillance, comes in. In political science jargon, it's called preventive or preemptive repression. You don't have to do hard repression. You can do soft repression. You maintain awareness of what your threats are up to and then you scare them, you deter them, you make them aware. You make your threats aware that they're being watched, so political stability or regime security is greatly enhanced.

jmk

Would you say that every authoritarian state is a surveillance state or do you see a fundamental difference between China, which has been called explicitly a surveillance state, and a country like Russia that maybe wishes it was a surveillance state?

Minxin Pei

Yeah, there are surveillance states and there are surveilling states. They differ in how they're organized and how effective they are - who their targets are. The Chinese surveillance state differs from surveilling states or surveillance apparatus elsewhere in other authoritarian regimes and former communist regimes in that the Chinese system is much better organized. It is much better resourced and it is far more expansive - not expensive. Expansive in that it covers a lot more than other surveillance systems in other dictatorships.

jmk

I think you touched on this a little bit, but can you explain and maybe elaborate a little bit more on how surveillance really changes society and changes the way that people behave in their ordinary lives within China.

Minxin Pei

Well, Josh Chin's book touches on this a little bit, but journalists really do not have the time as we scholars do who can spend years… I spent six years just collecting data. So, in terms of ordinary lives, it really depends on who you are, because a well-organized authoritarian regime has priorities. It classifies its threats according to the level of danger that they pose. For instance, China has two blacklists. One is run by the police. It's called Key Population, which covers roughly about 3 in 1,000. Most of the targets are ex-criminals, people who have been released, people who are suspected of engaging in criminal activities. It's a very small percentage. Probably less than 5 percent are explicitly political targets. There's a bigger program, which probably covers Five to six people in a thousand and that's maintained by local political authorities.

So, we're talking altogether almost 10- 12 million people. In other words, if you're talking about how it impacts people's lives, then 10 -12 million people are on blacklists. So, if you are on the key individuals list, which is maintained by local political authorities, there are a lot more political threats or potential political threats on that list than the list maintained by the police. If you're a member of Falun Gong or other cults, you're on that list. If you participate in protests, you will be likely on that list. Ethnic minorities or sometimes even ex-servicemen, because ex-servicemen in China are very well organized. So, for these people, there is a national database. Even though the lists are compiled by local authorities, they put your name…

So, if Justin is on the list, Justin's biometric information, cell phone information, will be in the national database. Justin, you now live in Indianapolis, but if you come to Los Angeles, the police in Los Angeles would know that you are there right away, because if you use a bank card, if you use your cell phone, they know you. This is the kind of system that will impact people's lives. If you are flagged as a high risk, and they have red, orange, green, so if you are classified as red, the police will come and grab you. I try to translate that into some kind of language or description people can understand.

jmk

How expansive is the idea of what China calls political? Would people be surprised that some of the activities that they do are considered political? Because going to a protest, that's obviously political. Being involved in some underground political party, I can understand that that's defined as political. But I can also imagine that some forms of economic activity might be defined as political. Some forms of social engagement, like being involved in different clubs, might be defined as political. Would people in China be surprised at what's considered political activity or something that the Chinese state might be monitoring?

Minxin Pei

Oh yeah. I think a few years ago there was this really ironic incident. A group of leftist students in Beijing, and there were a lot of them, formed a club studying Marxism. They wanted to read Marx and they were arrested, because that's considered political and that's a Communist Party regime. It does not like its citizens to study Marxism on their own, because those groups wanted to go to southern China to fight sweatshops, since that's the kind of thing Marx denounced. That's how the political can be defined in China.

Another thing I think that is political is if your house has been bulldozed by the local government because the government wanted to seize your property without paying you. Of course, you're wronged by the government and you want to get justice. The local government, of course, wouldn't hear anything you want to protest about. Then you go to a higher level of government. That's political. That's why petitioners are prominently featured on that blacklist.

jmk

So, you just implied that China has widespread informants and that was one of the key takeaways that I took from your book. One of the data points that you brought up that really shocked me was how many physical people they have to be able to give them information that are either informal or formal, meaning that they're actually paid by the Chinese state to be able to give them information. It took me by surprise because I'm thinking of China today as being a surveillance state, but surveilling through more digital means rather than more labor-intensive means where they actually have people providing them specific information. Can you talk a little bit about how many people are actually involved and the different types of informants that they have that are providing information for them?

Minxin Pei

If you look at the media accounts about China's surveillance state, you will get this distorted partial picture that China relies mostly on cameras, listening devices, and sensors to spy on its people. That's not true. That's because technology has a lot of blind spots. Technology can be defeated. The other day, I did a test. I wrapped my iPhone within aluminum foil and I called my iPhone from my house phone and it didn't ring. So, what it says is that signals can be blocked with a very cheap, simple method. There are a lot of areas technology cannot reach. That's why China deploys a lot of labor to monitor suspected people.

For example, China follows a political calendar that every March it has a rubber parliament that will meet. It’s a very important symbolic political event and they don't want any protests. So, before that meeting happens, they want to make sure that those people on the blacklist are actually where they are supposed to be. But if their cell phone is off, how do you know where they are? They have to do what they call door knocking operations. They will send a team of policemen, local officials, to go to that person's door and tell that person you are not supposed to go anywhere during this period. You cannot send a robot to do the job.

The official information is classified and I have to say that the police maintains its own network of informants and local authorities maintain theirs. I don't think local authorities and the police actually know about each other's networks, because the police network is far more secretive, classified, except for one province that incidentally disclosed its network of informers, which comes to about 4 in 10,000. So, what kind of people do they employ? They like people who can actually watch public venues. If you run a small shop next to a big square, you watch a lot of comings and goings. So, if something happens, the police will come to you. They also like taxi drivers, because they can know where their passengers go. They like delivery people, because delivery people can knock on your doors.

So, it's a variety, but what's interesting about the Chinese system is that most informants used by the police are for law enforcement purposes. This is a practice that the West uses as well. But they also use informants to watch political suspects. This was done under J. Edgar Hoover, but I think today the practice is much more controlled in the US. But local authorities use informants so if you, Justin, are known to have engaged in protests, you'll get one of the neighbors to be the government's eyes and ears.

Most Chinese people living in the cities live in so called little gated communities. It's very different from the American gated communities, except if you want to go into your apartment, you have to pass through a gate. So, they recruit people who watch those gates and if you go in, they will note your activity. So, these are the kind of activities or duties performed by informants.

jmk

What struck me was that many of them are formal informants. They might be people who've been convicted of crimes in the past that have networks and that they know people who might be doing criminal activity, and I'm using criminal loosely. It could be criminal activity that's really political activity. It could be criminal activity that the United States would consider criminal activity. But there's also just a large number of informal informants that aren't necessarily on anybody's payroll, but they rely on occasionally. They've got their name. They know who they are and they're ready to go to those specific people if they need certain types of information.

Has the Chinese state become more labor intensive as time has gone on or has it become less labor intensive? Because the number of informants I'm seeing just seems to be mind boggling. It just seems to be incredibly large. Is it continuing to grow or has China moved away from that model as they've begun to incorporate more technology?

Minxin Pei

It's hard to say, because it's very difficult to see any trends in the data. We only have one jurisdiction and that is Shaanxi Province. The police actually was very helpful and I'm sure by accident released some information covering 15 years. Clearly, there was an increase, but the last year reported was 2003. That's 20 years ago, so it's very hard to say. I think it's probably stable. Why? Because getting people to spy on other people is pretty hard. China can do this because the Communist Party is everywhere. The Communist Party controls a lot of resources. It has a lot of leverage: Business permits; job opportunities; membership in the party; in the case of colleges, going to grad school.

So, it can recruit people on the cheap, but it's not costless, because if you don't keep those goodies coming, even non-monetary rewards, then people are not going to spy for you. We don't know whether they will hire more people if the economy becomes worse. There are some arguments in either direction. There will be more people unhappy, so you will need to watch them more. But then if people are more unhappy, they might not want to spy for you. So, we don't know. We'll see. I just want to underscore that this kind of information is classified. It's very difficult. If you get very lucky, and in my case I did get quite lucky, you could find accidental disclosures in local yearbooks, police reports, and they can construct a picture.

But if you really want to know how the system works, we'll have to wait for China to become a free society. Then you might have a chance to see those local data. But lustration, as we know from the former Soviet bloc, is very hard. East Germany is actually the only former Soviet centralized state that disclosed its Stasi files. Poland stopped in the middle because it was too painful. It would be too disruptive. And Russia never did anything remotely resembling what happened in East Germany or the former East Germany. So, I think even after China became a democracy, we might not be able to find out.

jmk

You're making a lot of parallels to former communist states and in the book you emphasize how Leninist states - not just autocratic states but specifically Leninist states - adapt specifically well to the kind of surveillance state model. We can kind of intuitively imagine that because when we think of a country like let's say East Germany with the Stasi, it just makes us think of that country being effectively a surveillance state. Why is it that the Leninist state model seems to be particularly adaptive to a surveillance state model?

Minxin Pei

First, let me add one more detail. The Stasi had about 190,000 informants by the time East Germany disappeared. That's about 1 percent of the population. Maybe 1. 2% or 1.1% which is roughly equal the ratio of estimated informants in China. If you want to get one out of a hundred people to spy for you, it's actually pretty hard. We can try, but you've got to offer them something. I think a Leninist state, party state, is especially effective in conducting surveillance for these reasons. As I said, surveillance is a comprehensive task. It involves a lot of people and involves a lot of bureaucracies. It has to be maintained all year round.

If you're a poorly organized dictatorship, you cannot do it because a surveillance state is a state. Most other dictatorships are very weak states. They cannot do as good a job in organizing activities that we associate with state functions as a Leninist state, because the Leninist state is a hierarchical, very tightly organized political party, very disciplined, and top down. So, if the top leadership issues a priority directive, you can count on it to be carried out. You cannot say this with confidence about a military dictatorship. You cannot say this about a personal dictatorship with any degree of confidence, because these regimes are simply not well organized. The other thing about a Leninist state, communist Leninist state, is that it controls a huge part of the economy. So, it controls a lot of resources.

If you directly own or control a company that employs 10,000 people, it's really easy for you to direct the managers, the party secretaries, in that company to form a spying network to watch what its employees do. Try to do this in sort of a private company. Even in a dictatorship, it would be very hard. It's not impossible, but it would be a lot harder. Then universities are controlled by the government in the same way. Leninist parties are everywhere - in villages, in neighborhoods. So, you can imagine how with this organizational infrastructure, it is a lot easier and far more effective to perform surveillance tasks than in any other authoritarian regime.

jmk

When did China really become a surveillance state? Because we normally think of this as a more modern phenomenon, but in reading your book, I got the sense that it really starts almost from the beginning. It seems Mao himself really started the motion in terms of establishing the infrastructure that was necessary to be able to have what we now call a surveillance state. When would you say that China effectively became what we would now call a surveillance state?

Minxin Pei

Well, China developed its organizational institutional infrastructure of mass surveillance for political purposes immediately after the Communist Party took power in 1949. So, the surveillance state was born with the Chinese Communist Party state. It's a pillar of regime security. Most of the organizations have security agencies, mass surveillance programs, spying networks that were all built in the 1950s. Today, there are more of them in terms of personnel. They're better resourced in terms of pay and equipment. They're more professional. So, today's surveillance state is a modern version.

In the 1950s, China had a very primitive but quite effective surveillance state, relying exclusively on manpower, because in those days China was too poor to have any technology. Strictly speaking, I think China began to modernize its surveillance state only after 1989 with the Tiananmen crackdown. The party felt that the Tiananmen crackdown happened largely because its preventive repression failed and it would not have another Tiananmen. So, it very systematically began to build, modernize, expand, and invest in surveillance capabilities.

jmk

What did that modernization look like? What were the programs that they established and how did that complement the existing surveillance structure?

Minxin Pei

The first thing is that they greatly expanded the police. In ‘89, they had less than 800,000. Twenty years later, they had more than 2 million. So, they had a lot of police and then they began to recruit a lot of informants and they began to watch universities very carefully. Then they also began to build and expand this party security bureaucracy, called the Legal Political Committee, at all levels. This is a uniquely Chinese invention. The former Soviet regimes did not have that specialized party organization from top to bottom. So that particular committee supervises domestic security writ large, but also oversees what we consider surveillance activities. In the early 90s, it was mainly organizational manpower. Starting in the late 1990s, they began to introduce technology. They went about this in a very methodical and, you would say, intelligent way.

They knew that information digitization is the key. The first project was the so-called Golden Shield Project, which is to set up a secure digital information network for law enforcement. Before that police did not even have secure modern communication methods. They develop police networks equipped with all kinds of communications and they also build national databases. They actually copy the FBI. They use the same kind of crime information, technology, data management. So that was built around 20 years ago. Because that project completed and because the internet was coming, that project contained the Great Firewall of China. It's operated by the police.

In the second step, they focused on visual surveillance - streets, highways, shopping malls, airports. The second stage is called Skynet. They're putting in a lot of sensors and cameras. That began in around 2005 and it did not complete until probably 10 years ago and that focused only on urban areas. Then new technologies came along. Facial recognition did not get introduced until about 8-9 years ago. So, they had a third stage, which is an upgrade of Skynet. It's called Sharp Eyes. It's also an expansion of this program to the countryside. So, as you can see, they saw this thing through very carefully. They did not have the kind of system that Josh Chin and his coauthor Liza Lin described so well in their book. That's very recent.

jmk

So, there's been a lot of emphasis in terms of the technological upgrades that China has done in terms of its surveillance, but it still hasn't dismantled the raw manpower that they have behind the surveillance state as well. Has the technology lived up to its reputation within China? Does the Chinese state feel that they're delivering the type of results that they were expecting from this investment in technology or have there been any disappointments?

Minxin Pei

We don't know actually. There are a lot of things we don't know. One thing I've found in doing the research of the book is that technology, most journalistic accounts focus on technology, but when you look at what they describe, it's actually quite superficial. They just tell you cameras and sensors. They don't tell you how these systems are integrated into the labor-intensive part. So, I think that is a topic that needs to be researched and also the Chinese government maintains enormous secrecy around the application technology. So, we don't know. You only see the cameras. You can get records on public procurement because that's a process that local governments have to go through.

But other than that, how the system actually operates, we don't know. Occasionally you would know that now they have the capability if you walk past this concealed sensor and it picks up your cell phone. My understanding is that the system does a pretty good job in tracking mobile phones. It's easy, because people now cannot live, cannot leave home, without their mobile phones. That allows the government to track you. But other than that, their facial recognition is pretty good. In other words, they can maintain awareness, keep track of people on the blacklist if they're in public. But, as I said, there are areas they cannot reach, technology cannot reach. They cannot reach into your mind. They don't have that technology yet.

So, informers are needed. They need people who can gain access to you, talk to you, because I've come across a lot of references to the mental state of suspects. How can you detect a mental state? I think still it's a work in progress. They're trying to integrate manpower and technology and this next stage is called grid management. What they try to do is to divide a local community into grids and each grid will have 200 to 300 households. So, we're talking basically a thousand people and they will assign a grid attendant. This is a human being, but the attendant will be equipped with a smartphone that can record information. In other words, if you see something, you can input the information and then an application will report it to a higher grid. We're talking about rather than a thousand people, 10,000-30,000 people.

Each city will have different levels of grid. So, if the system works, we're talking not just about political activities, but traffic, sanitation. They try to achieve real time awareness of key developments. This is in the experimental stage, but this is where they try to go or they want to go. The other is what we've read a lot about - social credit system. My examination of the system is it's way more challenging than they thought. They wanted to build this system ten years ago and today it has not made much progress. I think the biggest problem is the data integration and national versus regional. Then how do you actually standardize Information, because we don't realize that if you want to code a certain behavior, it's actually very arbitrary. If you don't have uniform coding, then the information you generate is essentially garbage.

jmk

I think something like a social credit score has a real danger of overreacting because it's a lot easier to impose sticks than it is carrots. So, one lesson that I think we can draw from the experience over in a place like Xinjiang is that once you start imposing sticks, the way that China did, it becomes almost impossible not to just start imposing sticks on almost everybody because if you lock up somebody's mother then that means that their kids now are a danger to be able to react and the husband's a danger to do something. So now you're having to imprison the entire family and then that impacts the neighbors and then that impacts other people They all become high risk.

So what ended up happening in Xinjiang is you pretty much imprisoned almost everybody and it became a true dystopian scenario and like you said early on is that China wants to create a situation where they're monitoring everybody but nobody really knows that they're actually watching them so that they're able to react to stuff so early that the problem doesn't even look like it exists. In some ways, that's even more dystopian, to be honest, and something that imposes more sticks because they're trying to control the way that people think about things and the way that people react to society.

But I think that one of the dangers to being able to do what China is doing is that it's so easy to be looking for problems, and to some extent, you want to kind of ignore a lot of stuff, a lot of noise that exists, because otherwise you're going to start creating new problems and I think that's the concern that social credit really has for China.

Minxin Pei

Oh, absolutely. In the book I said the way they are doing this will generate more noise than signal as well. It will be a very inefficient system and I think that repression in Xinjiang shows if you abuse the surveillance state, you actually defeat the very purpose of the surveillance state, which is deterrence. Rather than some hard repression, you use surveillance to avoid excessive brutal repression. But if you abuse the system, then you produce the very results you want to avoid.

jmk

So, we've been talking about surveillance on to Chinese society and really on to just the general population. But one of the real concerns within totalitarian societies is that same exact surveillance also applies to the elites. Is surveillance a liability for the leadership of the CCP? When you have so much widespread surveillance on everybody, I would think that you'd almost be monitoring the people who have real political power even closer than you're monitoring everyday ordinary people. Is that something that's real concern for people who are in positions of political power?

Minxin Pei

Oh, absolutely. When Deng Xiaoping was in power in the 1980s, he set an explicit rule. He said China's secret service must never spy on the leadership. We do not know whether that order has actually been the practice, but based on what we know, Chinese leaders, very senior leaders, we're talking political members, don't talk at home. I have a friend who happens to know a former party bureau member and if they want to talk, they will go outside. Because today mobile tracking is so effective, so if you're a central committee member, a minister, you're not supposed to turn your phone off.

What's interesting is that they actually do not allow you to turn your phone off. So, if you meet with another elite, they can track where you are. I came across a deputy governor who turned his phone off because he was having an affair and very unfortunate for that guy, there was a big protest, a riot and he was in charge of law enforcement. They couldn't reach him. They investigated him and they found what he was doing. So, he was dismissed and put in jail. In other words, now they know where you are. They have to be really careful. That's it. In other words, as you said, the system applies to elites. I don't think it applies to Xi Jinping, but I think his colleagues probably are aware that they need to be careful when they speak to other people.

jmk

At the same time, didn't Xi Jinping demote the head of the surveillance within China from the… I think it was from the Politburo or it was from one of those higher central committees. He demoted them down so that they wouldn't have such a high level of formal power. That seems like somebody who both wants to use the surveillance state, but who's also afraid of the surveillance state.

Minxin Pei

Oh, yes, I think Xi Jinping is a very clever politician who knows where the threats may come from. Prior to him, the person who is the head of the Central Political Legal Committee, who oversees the secret police and the police was a Politburo Standing Committee member - a group of nine at the time, the most elite, powerful, small group within the Communist Party. After Xi Jinping came to power, the first thing he did was to demote that person. That is, the secretary of that committee now is just a Politburo member, not a Politburo Standing Committee member. That makes a world of difference. That's a very powerful signal. Another thing that the Communist Party has done very cleverly is to ensure that there are term limits in the security apparatus.

So, the head of that committee can serve only one term, because that makes it very hard for that guy to promote his cronies into various key security positions and the head of the secret police, the minister of state security, can only serve one term as is the case of the minister of public security, the police chief. Because if you look at the former Soviet bloc, there are KGB chiefs who serve multiple terms. There's this East German Stasi chief who was in power for more than two decades. This is unthinkable in China because the Communist Party knows that the threat from within is just as bad as the threat from without.

jmk

So, as we look to the future, what does the surveillance state really mean for China going forward? Is this going to be a source of their stability? Is this a source of eventual instability such as elites getting frustrated and fighting against it? Is this something that will hold back democratization in the long term and make it so that China becomes a true exception that no matter how rich they get, it becomes an obstacle towards ever becoming a democracy? What do you see for the future of China with such a large surveillance infrastructure being both there already and being developed even further?

Minxin Pei

I think a powerful surveillance apparatus will continue to be a major obstacle to the development of democratic forces, but it will not be the decisive factor. China's surveillance apparatus has worked well because the communist regime, by and large, has done well economically for its people. So, the system really has not been tested in a much more adverse environment. We want to give surveillance some credit, but we should not give it too much credit because there are a lot of other factors.

In the last 30 plus years, the post-Tiananmen period, that worked in the favor of the Chinese Communist Party. Surveillance was clearly one of them, but surveillance cannot be successful in a very different context. I think going forward one thing we can be sure is that surveillance will still be needed, but the party probably will rely a lot more on other things to keep itself in power and to prevent prodemocracy forces from gaining strength.

jmk

Well, Minxin, thank you so much for joining me today. I've been a big fan of your work, so it's really just a great honor to be able to take the time to talk to you and to learn from you today. I want to mention the book one more time. It just came out today, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China. Thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you so much for writing the book.

Minxin Pei

Thank you so much, Justin, for having me on your show.