Living With Digital Surveillance In China Citizens Narratives On Technology Privacy And Governance 1st Edition Ariane Olliermalaterre

Living With Digital Surveillance In China
Citizens Narratives On Technology Privacy And
Governance 1st Edition Ariane Olliermalaterre
download
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-with-digital-surveillance-
in-china-citizens-narratives-on-technology-privacy-and-
governance-1st-edition-ariane-olliermalaterre-56001842
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
Sustainable Development And Innovation Of Digital Enterprises For
Living With Covid19 Subhra R Mondal
https://ebookbell.com/product/sustainable-development-and-innovation-
of-digital-enterprises-for-living-with-covid19-subhra-r-
mondal-43888826
Live Below Your Means The Art Of Living With Very Little Money Micah
Coulter
https://ebookbell.com/product/live-below-your-means-the-art-of-living-
with-very-little-money-micah-coulter-7351546
Living Wisely With The Church Fathers Christopher A Hall
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-wisely-with-the-church-fathers-
christopher-a-hall-59451526
Cointelligence Living And Working With Ai Mollick Ethan
https://ebookbell.com/product/cointelligence-living-and-working-with-
ai-mollick-ethan-231043560

Living With Arts Crafts Ros Byam Shaw Andrew G Wood
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-with-arts-crafts-ros-byam-shaw-
andrew-g-wood-46778178
Living With The Land Rural And Agricultural Actors In Twentiethcentury
Europe A Handbook Liesbeth Van De Grift
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-with-the-land-rural-and-
agricultural-actors-in-twentiethcentury-europe-a-handbook-liesbeth-
van-de-grift-47109164
Living With The Enemy German Occupation Collaboration And Justice In
The Western Pyrenees 19401948 Sandra Ott
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-with-the-enemy-german-occupation-
collaboration-and-justice-in-the-western-pyrenees-19401948-sandra-
ott-47550424
Living With Intensity Susan Daniels Michael Marian Piechowski
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-with-intensity-susan-daniels-
michael-marian-piechowski-47756322
Living With Extreme Intelligence Sonja Falck
https://ebookbell.com/product/living-with-extreme-intelligence-sonja-
falck-48171886

‘Surveillance operated by the Chinese social credit system has attracted much
criticism from Western countries but few trouble to discover how Chinese
people themselves understand and respond to surveillance. Living with Digital
Surveillance engages directly, through vivid interviews, with Chinese citizens
in three cities, showing how their surveillance imaginaries display distinctive
features. A sensitive and illuminating contribution to our understanding of
both Chinese and surveillance studies’.
Prof. David Lyon, Queen’s University, Canada
‘Living with Digital Surveillance in China is an essential resource for anyone
interested in digital surveillance in China. It provides insightful analysis
that will help students, scholars, and practitioners better understand how
authorities in China use digital technologies for social governance and how
Chinese citizens live with it. The book draws from multiple literatures and
rich fieldwork to shed light on citizens’ attitudes, behaviour, and narratives
regarding digital surveillance. It is an important reminder that surveillance
practices must be analysed within a country’s historical, socioeconomic, and
political context. This lively book is a must-read for the times we live in’.
Prof. Genia Kostka, Institute for Chinese Studies,
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
‘Surveillance has become ever more a fact of daily life in China, and a necessary
object of study to understand the evolving ways in which the Communist
Party of China governs society. However, lacking from view has been the
way in which Chinese individuals see and engage with this surveillance state.
In Living with Digital Surveillance in China, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre paints
a rich and complex picture that will be of interest to China scholars and
surveillance specialists in equal measure’.
Prof. Rogier Creemers, Modern Chinese Studies, Leiden University, The
Netherlands
‘Amidst persistent misunderstandings of China’s social credit systems, Living with
Digital Surveillance in China provides a much needed, empirically grounded, and
innovative account of Chinese citizens’ narratives of technology and surveillance
as well as their coping strategies. Ariane Ollier-Malaterre carefully documents
how certain hegemonic ideas of techno-nationalism such as the identity
narrative of national humiliation and technological solutionism are reproduced
and negotiated in everyday life, shaping citizens’ surveillance imaginaries. This
book will be a valuable read for those who are interested in critical approaches
to surveillance studies that challenge Eurocentric epistemology and centre the
agency and lived lives of communities beyond the West’.
Prof. Chenchen Zhang, Durham University, UK

Digital surveillance is a daily and all-encompassing reality of life in China. This book
explores how Chinese citizens make sense of digital surveillance and live with it. It
investigates their imaginaries about surveillance and privacy from within the Chinese
socio-political system.
Based on in-depth qualitative research interviews, detailed diary notes, and extensive
documentation, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ the internet and
surveillance literature. She shows how the research participants weave a cohesive system
of anguishing narratives on China’s moral shortcomings and redeeming narratives
on the government and technology as civilising forces. Although many participants
cast digital surveillance as indispensable in China, their misgivings, objections, and
the mental tactics they employ to dissociate themselves from surveillance convey the
mental and emotional weight associated with such surveillance exposure.
The book is intended for academics and students in internet, surveillance, and
Chinese studies, and those working on China in disciplines such as sociology,
anthropology, social psychology, psychology, communication, computer sciences,
contemporary history, and political sciences. The lay public interested in the
implications of technology in daily life or in contemporary China will find it accessible
as it synthesises the work of sinologists and offers many interview excerpts.
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, PhD, is Professor of Management and the Director of the
International Network on Technology, Work and Family at the University of Quebec
in Montreal (ESG-UQAM), Canada. She chairs the Technology, Work and Family
research community of the Work and Family Researchers Network. Her research
examines digital technologies and the boundaries between work and life across
different national contexts. She has published over 70 peer-reviewed chapters and
articles in top-tier management, sociology, psychology, and information systems
outlets (e.g. Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal,
Journal of Management, Human Relations, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of
Applied Psyschology, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Computers
in Human Behavior).
LIVING WITH DIGITAL
SURVEILLANCE IN CHINA

Surveillance is one of the fundamental sociotechnical processes underpinning
the administration, governance and management of the modern world. It
shapes how the world is experienced and enacted. The much-hyped growth in
computing power and data analytics in public and private life, successive scan-
dals concerning privacy breaches, national security and human rights have
vastly increased its popularity as a research topic. The centrality of personal
data collection to notions of equality, political participation and the emergence
of surveillant authoritarian and post-authoritarian capitalisms, among other
things, ensure that its popularity will endure within the scholarly community.
A collection of books focusing on surveillance studies, this series aims
to help to overcome some of the disciplinary boundaries that surveillance
scholars face by providing an informative and diverse range of books, with
a variety of outputs that represent the breadth of discussions currently tak-
ing place. The series editors are directors of the Centre for Research into
Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP). CRISP is an interdisciplinary
research centre whose work focuses on the political, legal, economic and
social dimensions of the surveillance society.
Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period
1780–1830
Lucy E. Thompson
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-
in-Surveillance/book-series/RSSURV
Routledge Studies in Surveillance
Kirstie Ball, William Webster, Charles Raab, Pete Fussey
Kirstie Ball is Professor in Management at University of St Andrews, UK
William Webster is Professor of Public Policy and Management at the
University of Stirling, UK
Charles Raab is Professorial Fellow in Politics and International Relations at
the University of Edinburgh, UK
Pete Fussey is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of
Essex, UK

LIVING WITH DIGITAL
SURVEILLANCE IN CHINA
Citizens’ Narratives on Technology,
Privacy, and Governance
Ariane Ollier-Malaterre

First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2024 Ariane Ollier-Malaterre
The right of Ariane Ollier-Malaterre to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ollier-Malaterre, Ariane, author.
Title: Living with digital surveillance in China : citizens’ narratives on
technology, privacy, and governance / Ariane Ollier-Malaterre.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge studies in surveillance | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023019389 (print) | LCCN 2023019390 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032517742 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032517704
(paperback) | ISBN 9781003403876 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Electronic surveillance—Social aspects—China. | Social
control—China.
Classification: LCC HV7936.T4 O54 2024 (print) | LCC HV7936.T4
(ebook) | DDC 363.2/320951—dc23/eng/20230706
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019389
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019390
ISBN: 978-1-032-51774-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-51770-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-40387-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003403876
Data availability statement for Living with Digital Surveillance in
China:
Due to the nature of this research, participants of this book did not
agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not
available.
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To my family, to my friends, and to all who aspire
to understand

List of figures and tables xiii
Acknowledgements xiv
List of abbreviations xvi
Introduction 1
Digital surveillance in China 1
Analytical lens and methods 3
Epistemic positioning 5
Core arguments 7
Structure of the book 8
PART I
Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems 15
1 Privacy and surveillance 17
Privacy 17
Surveillance 21
Surveillance on a continuum between care and control 26
Perceptions of privacy and surveillance 28
CONTENTS

x Contents
2 Surveillance in China: from Dang’an and Hukou to the
social credit systems 40
Personal and household registers 40
Social governance in the 21st century 41
Bottom-up and top-down approaches: grid
management and the golden shield 43
The social credit systems 45
Current status of data centralisation and algorithmic
sorting in China 50
PART II
Anguishing narratives of moral shortcomings 59
3 Rules and monitoring will raise people’s ‘moral quality’ 61
The rhetoric of rules and punishment in Chinese
society 63
Rules and punishment as tools for moral progress 72
The civilising power of technology-enforced rules 80
4 National humiliations and the civilisation dream 84
Saving China’s national face: the dialectics of pride
and shame 85
The dreams 92
5 Saving face: privacy as hiding shameful information 103
Privacy imaginaries 104
What do you hide? Privacy as the saving of face
and social respectability 111
Who do you hide from? Parents and supervisors, not
the government 118
PART III
Redeeming narratives of digital protection 125
6 The government as protection and order 127
China is not an ordinary country: it is the Middle
Kingdom 130

Contents xi
Government as parental protection: surveillance as care 135
Democracy: ‘the government is by the people’ 146
7 Technology as a magic bullet 152
Convenience in every aspect of life 153
Love of technology 157
The moral function of technology 161
Technology will give China its due place in the world 166
The darker side of technology: opacity 169
PART IV
The mental and emotional weight of surveillance 177
8 Mental tactics to dissociate oneself from surveillance 179
Brushing surveillance aside: minimising, ignoring,
normalising, and reframing surveillance 180
Othering surveillance targets 194
Wearing blinders: ‘so far, it has not harmed me’ 203
Resorting to fatalism: ‘It does not matter’ 207
9 Misgivings and objections 213
Awareness and unpleasant feelings 214
Behaviours to limit surveillance exposure 227
Marginal but elaborate objections to generalised
surveillance 229
Generalised surveillance of everybody versus being
singled out 240
Disconnect between narratives on surveillance
and emotional reactions to it 242
10 Self-censorship 246
Interviewing at the margin of politics 247
Self-censorship in action 254
Conclusion 267
Implications for Chinese studies: how may the unstable
equilibrium shift in the future? 267
Implications for surveillance studies in other contexts 271

xii Contents
Appendix: Methods 275
Recruitment of the interview research participants 275
Interview guide 277
Interpreters’ training 281
Diary of observation data 282
Research data analysis 283
Bibliography 287
Index 303

Figures
I.1 Living with digital surveillance in China: intra-individual
tensions 9
3.1 Word cloud on rules and punishment, as rendered by NVivo 1263
4.1 Word cloud on China and the civilisation dream, as
rendered by NVivo 12 93
5.1 Word cloud on privacy, as rendered by NVivo 12 119
6.1 Word cloud on the government, as rendered by NVivo 12 138
7.1 Word cloud on technology, as rendered by NVivo 12 162
8.1 Mental tactics of dissociation from surveillance 180
Tables
A.1 Breakdown of the 58 research participants 277
A.2 Language in which the interviews were conducted 282
A.3 Formality and duration of the interviews 282
FIGURES AND TABLES

This book has been an adventure in many ways.
I am very grateful to the professors who have invited me to China, the
doctoral students who have been gracious interpreters, and the many persons
who have contributed to this research by sharing their insights in formal and
informal interviews. I have been thinking of every one of you very often these
past years, and I hope this book does justice to your thoughts and feelings.
I also want to express my appreciation for the hard work of the sinologists,
privacy and surveillance scholars, and scholars in other disciplines, whose
research and translations have nurtured my thinking and have informed the
book deeply.
Warm thanks to my family and friends who have believed in this book and
have supported me throughout excitements and doubts. You have installed
WeChat on your phones to chat with me when I was travelling in China,
listened patiently to my accounts of encounters and observations, gifted me
books on China, watched Chinese movies with me, joked about how I kept
bringing up China in just every conversation these past four years, and never
stopped asking when you would be able to read the book. I hope you will find
it accessible and will enjoy the stories it attempts to tell. I want to thank my
students too, who have shown enthusiasm for the project and have patiently
let me digress to China whenever I could.
Dear colleagues of the Work and Family Researchers Network, the Acad-
emy of Management, and the Association of Internet Researchers, thank
you for helping me build relationships with Chinese scholars. Dear mem-
bers of the International Network on Technology, Work and Family, you
have been awesome companions ever since I have begun exploring how we
live with digital technologies. I gratefully acknowledge funding by the Social
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements xv
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the ESG School of
Management of the University of Quebec in Montreal.
Dear colleagues of the University of Quebec in Montreal, thank you for
your support and trusting that I would put a sabbatical leave to good use;
Alexandre Méthé, you are a superb librarian. Ilham Lferde, Sabrina Pellerin,
and Charles-Etienne Lavoie, thank you for your exceptional research assis-
tance and positive energy. Yang Jing, thank you for teaching me Mandarin
and becoming a friend: you see, older students can make it too! Nathalie Pan,
of Circuits Chine, thank you for recommending Silk Roads itineraries; your
diligence has made a dream come true.
Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes and Corvis Catsouphes, you have been my first
readers and your uplifting words have been just wonderful. Mila Lazarova
and Emmanuelle Léon, thank you for your kind and insightful reviews of the
book proposal; Gary Powell, Jeffrey Greenhaus, Ellen Kossek, Stephen Sweet,
Nilanjan Raghunath, and Christine Beckman, thank you for your precious
advice as I navigated the new territory of monograph publication. I am grate-
ful to the reviewers of previous versions of the manuscript as their comments
have considerably strengthened the book, and to Jean-François Billeter for an
enlightening correspondence. Emily Briggs and Lakshita Joshi, and series edi-
tors Kirstie Ball, William Webster, Charles Raab, and Pete Fussey, thank you
for your enthusiastic support. David Lyon, Genia Kostka, Rogier Creemers,
and Chenchen Zhang, I am most grateful for your generous endorsements.

AI Artificial Intelligence
CCTV Closed-Circuit TeleVision
CPC Communist Party of China
GDPR General Data Protection Regulation
HR Human Resources
IT Information Technology
NDRC National Development and Reform Commission
PIPL Personal Information Protection Law
QR Quick Response
VPN Virtual Private Network
ABBREVIATIONS

DOI: 10.4324/9781003403876-1
Digital surveillance in China
In many parts of the worlds, citizens are subjected to surveillance when they
conduct internet searches, write emails, post on social media, make electronic
payments, or go by facial recognition cameras (i.e. cameras that can identify
a person by matching a picture or video of them against faces stored in a
database). Public administrations operate background checks, collect data
on citizens, and sort them into categories.
1
Commercial companies rate their
customers’ trustworthiness, openly or not.
2
Mobile payment phone applica-
tions such as GooglePay, Apple Pay, and M-Pesa make transactions highly
traceable. Surveillance studies have thus far mostly examined North Amer-
ican and European contexts. However, surveillance and citizens’ attitudes
towards it are embedded in different historical, socio-economic, and politi-
cal contexts. Therefore, researching other contexts such as the Chinese one,
where surveillance has deep historical roots and draws on the most recent
technological advances,
3
is both important and timely.
Several factors make China a fascinating setting in which to study surveil-
lance. The state and other governmental bodies systematically collect data
on citizens in partnerships with commercial companies such as Baidu, Ali-
baba, Tencent, and Xiaomi (known as ‘BATX’, with the same preponder-
ance in China as Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon in other countries).
4

Several factors explain the broad scope of data collection. First, the use of
cash is fast disappearing. Nearly everything requires payment trough Alipay
(Alibaba) or WeChat Pay (Tencent): people use these applications to pay for
a bus ride, rent a bike, hail a taxi, split the cost of a restaurant meal, shop
online, book train or show tickets, settle their taxes and utility bills, and
INTRODUCTION

2 Introduction
much more.
5
Second, social media platforms are the fabric of everyday life
for personal, social, and work purposes – people look up the news on Weibo
and entertain themselves on TikTok; they exchange countless text, audio,
and video messages on WeChat daily; and WeChat is considered in many
workplaces as easier and faster to use than email – the penetration of email
in business communications is 30 per cent while that of WeChat is 90 per
cent.
6
Third, China has the highest ratio of closed-circuit television (CCTV)
cameras to citizens in the world – one for every 12 people
7
; it is also a leader
in facial recognition cameras, with companies such as Hikvision, Megvii, or
Sensetime exporting their technology.
8
Fourth, advances in artificial intel-
ligence, machine learning, and information systems architecture enable more
efficient centralisation and analysis of these massive datasets, paving the way
for scoring algorithms. Building on this technology and modelling American
credit rating companies that derive people’s trustworthiness from normative
behavioural standards,
9
the 2014–2020 Chinese government plan sets the
implementation of a social credit system as a central objective.
10
The plan
proposed to establish blacklists of organisations and individual citizens who
violate the law and to attribute ‘social credit’ scores to citizens, based on
their financial, social, and personal behaviours.
11
The building of the social
credit system has progressed steadily since 2014.
12
While there is to date no
unique social credit system or score per citizen, the COVID-19 pandemic has
accelerated the digital tracking and scoring of citizens.
13
In sum, the scale
of the data being collected from 940 million internet users,
14
the fast pace
of technological development, and China’s innovations in integrated social
media applications, electronic commerce and payments, facial recognition,
and artificial intelligence,
15
truly warrant an examination of digital surveil-
lance in this country.
Importantly, all this occurs in a context of rapid economic and social
change channelled by tight political control. In ways that contrast with West-
ern liberal democracies, the goal of the Chinese government to control citi-
zen’s behaviour is explicit, as the Chinese studies professor Rogier Creemers
explains:
The Chinese government does not see the need to control the conduct of its
citizens through surreptitious or invisible means. Social control techniques
prevalent in Western liberal democracies, such as gamification [the use of
game-like incentives, such as points or badges, in non-game context] or
nudging, are supposed to be largely unnoticeable: individuals are steered
through the exploitation of inherent biases and unconscious decision-
making strategies. The SCS [social credit system] on the other hand does
not hide its paternalism under a bushel: it is part of an openly declared and
widely propagated effort to instill civic virtue, and conjoined with propa-
ganda campaigns to raise individuals’ consciousness about their actions.
16

Introduction 3
This book is based on qualitative in-depth interviews and observations
conducted in China, as well as extensive documentation of the academic and
the grey literature. In a country where a large proportion of the population
supports some degree of surveillance,
17
the book examines how the Chinese
citizens participating in this research perceive digital surveillance and how
they live with it. Specifically, it analyses their ‘surveillance imaginaries’, a
term coined by surveillance studies pioneer David Lyon, that is their mental
images of surveillance and how they respond to it.
18
Moreover, it examines
the emotional repercussions of such a proximity to ubiquitous and ‘in-use’
data streams in the background of their everyday life, whether they notice it
acutely or not.
19
This book explores key research questions at the intersection of surveil-
lance, privacy, internet, and Chinese studies: how do Chinese citizens view
digital surveillance and its daily implications, as they scan their faces to enter
buildings and public areas, search on the web, make bookings, pay, or check
social media? How do their national and local historical, socio-economic,
and political contexts shape their surveillance imaginaries and affect towards
surveillance? What do they know and notice about the social credit systems
and other components of the Chinese ‘surveillance assemblage’
20
? To what
extent do they anticipate digital surveillance and change their behaviours
because of it?
While this book focuses on China, its implications are much broader. Pon-
dering how the Chinese citizens participating in this research view digital
surveillance and live with it can help to reflect on citizens’ attitudes, behav-
iours, and narratives regarding digital surveillance in other socio-economic,
cultural, and political contexts such as the Western liberal democracies and
countries of the Global South. In addition, the social credit system may well
export itself outside of China: as part of the Belt and Road initiative, China’s
government has proposed to establish a transnational credit system securing
international trade and economic relations across 65 other countries in Asia,
Africa, and Europe.
21
Analytical lens and methods
A polycontextual research
My background is in sociology, social media and internet studies, and cross-
national research. I chose polycontextualisation as the analytical lens under-
pinning this book. The central tenet of polycontextualisation is that reaching
a ‘holistic and valid understanding of any phenomenon’ in a country requires
accounting for multiple layers of the country’s national context.
22
First, polycontextualisation can be understood as the extension of a long-
standing epistemic tradition in cross-cultural and monocultural research that

4 Introduction
of societal analysis.
23
Societal analysis examines its objects in light of the
unique societal effect resulting from interrelations between different systems
in a country.
24
The layers comprising a country’s national context may be
physical (e.g. geography, climate), historical (e.g. sovereignty, traumas), cul-
tural (e.g. beliefs and values), social (e.g. education system, family structure,
religion), political (e.g. political system, legal system), and economic (e.g.
economic system, industrial relations systems, technology).
25
A direct impli-
cation of the polycontextual approach is the reliance on a multidisciplinary
examination of a country’s national context, drawing on sociology, psychol-
ogy, anthropology, history, political science, economics, industrial relations,
and additional disciplines depending on the phenomenon being investigated.
This book will therefore relate the analysis of interview narratives to China’s
history, economic development, and socio-political environment.
Second, polycontextualisation implies supplementing conventional
research methods, such as surveys or interviews, with non-linear thinking
that pays attention to non-verbal cues such as verbal cues or changes in voice
intonations, to what happens in the background of the research setting, and
to emotions. Polycontextual research calls for ‘thinking emotionally’, mean-
ing ‘to attempt to cognitively understand a phenomenon by focusing on reac-
tions that are, again not narrative in nature, but emotional’.
26
This book will
therefore analyse not only participants’ discourse but also their non-verbal
reactions and emotions, leveraging the contextual knowledge that I have
accumulated during my travels in China.
A polycontextual lens does not mean that this book can only shed light on
the Chinese context. On the contrary, shedding light on the embeddedness
of research participants’ narratives on digital surveillance in different layers
of context is a call to conduct similar reflexive and polycontextual thinking
on citizens’ attitudes towards digital surveillance in other country contexts.
Conducting fieldwork in China as a foreigner
The project started with a 2-year preparation phase in which I started to learn
Mandarin, read on Chinese history, and approached Chinese colleagues. I was
born and raised in France and have lived in Canada since 2012. The Chinese col-
leagues viewed my foreigner identity in contrasted ways. One of them warned
me that the interviews questions, asked by a foreigner, could be seen as political
and that participants might see me as a potential ‘spy’. She thought that I should
frame my research as a cross-cultural comparison and reach out for formal col-
laborations with Chinese scholars. She also thought that participants would be
on their guard, explaining: ‘people may think you are prejudiced, and you have
come here to judge’. Another colleague gave me a similar piece of advice:
People won’t discuss these matters, or they won’t give genuine answers,
or they will report you. You need to ask what people are proud of, what’s

Introduction 5
interesting in WeChat, in good ways, what the Chinese system has improved
compared to Canada.
By contrast, another Chinese colleague argued that people may trust a for-
eign interviewer more than a Chinese one. He believed that people in China
were generally eager to talk with foreigners and were mostly careful because
the government is nervous about foreigners. He suggested that people would
likely say more to me than to a Chinese interviewer because I was unlikely to
be an ‘agent provocateur’; that is, a person who tries to make people agree
with dissent and then reports them:
They may think a Chinese interviewer is even more a spy than a West-
erner! They may be more open to foreigners, because that is exciting. You
may be the first and the last foreigner to listen to them!
I was eventually invited by three university professors to give research
talks and collect data during my sabbatical leave. My institution’s review
board granted ethical approval to conduct research with human subjects
after requesting that I delete the participants’ names and contact details once
the interviews had been conducted, as well as the emails, WeChat messages,
and other traces.
I conducted 58 research interviews in 2019 in Chengdu, Shanghai, and
Beijing, and kept a diary of daily observations during the time I spent at these
universities as well as on the individual trip I took in the Western provinces of
Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinhai, Xinjiang, and Sichuan. My hosts’ graduate students
served as interpreters and reassurance for the participants that the interview
was being conducted for an academic purpose. The methodological Appen-
dix details the recruitment of the participants, the breakdown of the sample,
the data collection and analysis methods, and the strengths and limitations
of this research.
Epistemic positioning
As the international relations professor Zhen Wang explains in his book,
Never Forget National Humiliation. Historical Memory in Chinese Politics
and Foreign Relations, the disciplines of international relations and political
science have developed within the framework of Euro-American intellectual
traditions. This leaves everyone guessing about China’s future because of a
‘lack of understanding about the inner world of Chinese people’,
27
particu-
larly their motivations and intentions. Wang calls for the study of Chinese
indigenous attitudes, resources, and motivations to help bridge the gap in
understanding between the West and China. This is the path I am trying to
follow: this book attempts to ‘de-Westernise’ the internet and surveillance lit-
erature by analysing research participants’ mindsets from within the Chinese

6 Introduction
socio-political system. It focuses on participants’ surveillance imaginaries
while putting my own views on surveillance at a distance. In turn, the poly-
contextualisation of China invites readers to a critical examination of the
contexts that shape Western and other surveillance imaginaries.
Giving a non-judgemental account is a laudable objective, yet several traps
lurk on this road, such as eurocentrism, cultural relativism, and ‘going native’.
First, Western media and scholarly literature on surveillance in China have
been criticised as painting a dark picture of China while idealising Western
liberal democracies in an imperialist manner.
28
Roughly put, Western media
tend to present the Chinese internet as unfree and the Western internet as free,
without critically examining surveillance in their own societies. In addition,
Chinese scholars are increasingly challenging Western ‘techno-orientalist’
narratives that offer a negative portrait of China through scary stories and
sometimes fictitious accounts of what happens there, particularly regarding
the social credit system.
29
They have argued that in some cases, these accounts
reflect the authors’ latent racism, or their instrumentalisation of China to
produce a convenient ‘other’ in domestic debates.
30
Therefore, any book on
surveillance in China by a Western writer risks being received as ideological
by Chinese readers. To distance myself from my own French and Canadian
culture and from polarised views of China versus ‘the West’, I adopted the
posture of the qualitative inductive researcher and delayed reading sinolo-
gists’ research on contemporary China until after I had conducted fieldwork.
In line with the polycontextual lens, I coded the interview transcripts based
on what the participants had said rather than pre-established categories stem-
ming from academic readings
31
and refrained from personal evaluations.
Second, cultural relativism is an insidious trap, as the Chinese government
is precisely using the claim that democratic values, as currently defined by the
West, are not universal, to reject evaluations of its actions under the prism
of human rights. As sinologist Jean-François Billeter clearly exposed in his
latest essay,
32
the Xi Jinping era stepped up the discourse on the singularity
and self-contained nature of the Chinese civilisation, which the government
purports to defend against Western values framed as corrosive and hypo-
critical. This ‘great narrative’
33
is inherently paradoxical: at the same time
that it claims particularism, the Communist Party of China (CPC) actively
promotes the universal and central contributions of the Chinese civilisation
to the world and a new international order in which democracy and human
rights are redefined in line with its interests.
34
Importantly, while I analyse
Chinese citizens’ narratives in their particular historical and socio-political
context, I do not condone systematic surveillance in China or other countries
and do not intend to minimise the severe impacts of digital surveillance for
citizens in China, especially those who continue to uphold democratic values.
The book, therefore, embeds critical scholarship from Western as well as
Chinese scholars.

Introduction 7
Third, it was also necessary to keep a critical distance to China and not ‘go
native’, that is, embrace the perspectives of the participants without retain-
ing an analytical mind. As I spent time in China and developed relationships
with colleagues, I became aware of feelings of loyalty towards them that
could well have created other biases and led me to censor my writing to avoid
creating trouble for them, disappointing them, and having my work met with
the classic riposte: ‘you don’t understand China’. To recreate some distance
after I came back, I immersed myself in sinologists’ work
35
and fiction by Chi-
nese novelists in exile, kept abreast of Chinese intellectuals’ thinking, thanks
to David Ownby’s ‘Reading the China Dream’ translations and analyses,
36

listened to Cindy Yu’s ‘Chinese whispers’ podcasts,
37
followed Jeff Ding’s
ChinAI newsletter,
38
and attended conference workshops on contemporary
China.
Core arguments
While the interview questions were focused on the digital artefacts and
underlying infrastructures of surveillance such as social media, cameras,
electronic payments, and the social credit system, the participants kept
diverging from these practical matters to bring up morality, social judge-
ment, rules, and punishment. Their perception that China needed to make
progress to revive its ancient place in the world as a central civilisation
was also very vividly expressed. Moreover, participants’ words when they
discussed the government and technology were strikingly affective and
symbolic.
Successive rounds of data analysis and extensive further readings in the
field of Chinese studies led me to identify several core narratives of their sur-
veillance imaginaries; note that the value of narratives does not lie in repre-
senting an ‘objective’ reality but instead in capturing how people portray and
account for the social world as they experience it. Three related narratives
of moral shortcomings produced shame and anguish among the participants:
(a) the lack of ‘moral quality’ in China which makes rules and punishment
necessary, (b) the century of humiliations by foreign powers and the impera-
tive to revive the ancient Chinese civilisation, and (c) a pejorative view of
privacy as a suspicious desire to hide shameful behaviours.
With the help of visual representations of the patterns in different inter-
views, I came to discern that participants’ positive narratives on the gov-
ernment as protector and on technology as a magic bullet to all of China’s
problems were responding to the anguishing narratives of moral shortcom-
ings: they were redeeming narratives. Thus, a cohesive system of narratives
was formed that set the stage for digital surveillance to be cast as a viable tool
to enforce rules and propel China on a trajectory of ‘moral quality’, safety,
strength, and international recognition – the ‘Chinese Dream’.

8 Introduction
Despite these rendering of these narratives, however, almost all partici-
pants engaged in mental tactics to deny or minimise their personal exposure
to digital surveillance and its associated risks: they attempted to convince
themselves they were not the direct targets of surveillance or to discard
consequences of their exposure. Moreover, about half of the participants
expressed misgivings and unpleasant emotions about surveillance, especially
the idea of being singled out as a target of surveillance. A certain degree of
self-censorship and orthodoxy was also manifest in the interviews.
These analyses led me to formulate the core arguments of this book:
(1) A cohesive system of anguishing versus redeeming narratives (moral
shortcomings in China versus government and technology offering digi- tal protection) creates a setting where digital surveillance is cast by most participants as an indispensable solution in China.
(2) However, surveillance weighs on citizens: most participants elaborated
mental tactics to dissociate themselves from surveillance and about half of them expressed misgivings and objections to surveillance.
(3) There is great tension between the discursive framing of surveillance as
indispensable in China and the mental and emotional weight that partici-
pants bear as they cope with surveillance.
In other words, the participants’ imaginaries of digital surveillance are
characterised by an underlying paradox: ‘surveillance is good for China; however, I don’t like it and I am trying to forget about it’. This paradox intersects but also extends and nuances the tension identified among West-
ern citizens who support surveillance directed at others but not surveillance directed at them.
39
As illustrated in Figure I.1, this tension created palpable
psychological discomfort for many participants. It also implies an unstable equilibrium which could rapidly shift towards increased rejection of surveil- lance, as the December 2022 protests against the COVID-19 lockdowns have shown.
Structure of the book
Part I offers two introductory chapters that define privacy and surveillance,
summarise existing research, and discuss the Chinese context. Chapter 1
introduces readers to conceptions of privacy in China and the W
est, surveil-
lance at the interpersonal, commercial, and state levels, and how citizens in China and the West perceive privacy and surveillance. Chapter 2 traces the
long history of surveillance in China and explains the state’s philosophy of ‘social governance’ and how surveillance operates through bottom-up grid management and top-down database centralisation. It then analyses how different ‘social credit’ systems in construction score citizens based on their

Introduction 9
financial, social, and personal behaviours to reward and punish them, up to
the evolutions of digital surveillance in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Part II analyses the three related narratives of moral shortcomings that
produce shame and anguish among the participants. Chapter 3
explores
the ‘moral quality’ narrative as a source of support for digital surveillance.
Many participants emphasised the importance of rules and punishment and
lamented the lack of ‘moral quality’ of their fellow citizens. Framing sur-
veillance as rule enforcement, they implied that people should be treated as
children and punishment was needed for their education and moral progress.
Their main concern was not that they were being monitored or the exist-
ence of blacklists; it was the opacity and fluctuating application of rules
and punishment, which undermined their control over how to stay out of
trouble. Chapter 4 analyses the multifaceted narratives regarding China and
the West. On the one hand, participants evoked the century of humiliations
and continued fears of being attacked. On the other hand, they expressed
pride in China’s achievements and hopes in a promised trajectory to restore
the country. They longed for the recognition of China as a modern civilised
country and viewed economic development and public safety as constitut-
ing moral progress. Chapter 5 delves into the moral roots of perceptions of
privacy. The participants primarily understood privacy as the concealment
of shameful information to save face and maintain respectability (yīnsī) as
opposed to personal thoughts or information you do not wish to disclose in
public (yǐnsī). This morally tainted view of privacy made wanting privacy
suspicious. Moreover, most participants did not identify corporations or the
government as threatening their privacy; instead, they were concerned about
social groups whose judgement they avoided (e.g. parents and supervisors).
Part III focuses on the redeeming narratives that are meant to assuage
the moral shortcomings narratives: the protective parental figure of the FIGURE I.1 Living with digital surveillance in China: intra-individual tensions

10 Introduction
government and the cutting-edge Chinese technology. Chapter 6 unpacks
the different rationales underlying the participants’ support for the govern-
ment. The first states that China is unique because of its history, culture, and
size and that the one-party system is therefore the only way to counter chaos
in China and avoid reliving the shame of past humiliations. The second is
a view of the government as a trusted protector, almost a parent, which is
needed when ‘moral quality’ is lacking. The third is that the government is
democratic in the Chinese sense, that is, it originates in the people and the
people have a voice. Chapter 7 discusses how participants expected technol-
ogy to improve people’s ‘moral quality’ by forcing them to follow the rules
and to cure China by uprooting secrecy and hidden behaviours. It illustrates
the strong affective words, such as ‘love’, with which the participants talked
about technology and claimed ‘technology will solve all of China’s prob-
lems’. It shows how this discourse on technology as propelling China on its
quest to revive its previous glory responds to the three underlying narratives
of moral shortcomings.
Viewing digital surveillance as indispensable does not mean that partici-
pants lived well with it. Part IV turns to how participants coped with their
exposure to surveillance. Chapter 8 classifies the mental tactics that almost
nine out of ten participants used to dissociate themselves from the risks
attached to surveillance. It identifies four main self-protective rationales:
(1) brushing surveillance aside with the rationale ‘there is no risk associated
with surveillance’, (2) othering surveillance targets with the rationale ‘I am a
small potato/a good person’, (3) wearing blinders based on the rationale that
‘so far it has not harmed me’, and (4) resorting to fatalism with the rationale
‘it does not matter because I can only accept it’. In addition to engaging in
these tactics, almost half of the participants expressed misgivings and objec-
tions to surveillance. Chapter 9
analyses their apprehension, their behaviours
to limit exposure, and the principled objections voiced by a small fraction
of participants. It discusses how participants mostly accepted generalised
surveillance applying to everyone but strongly rejected being singled out by
that surveillance. Lastly, it points out a disconnect between their discourse
on the value of surveillance, which reflected the cohesive system of narra-
tives discussed in parts II and III of the book, and their emotional rejection
of it (e.g. dislike, resentment, worries, frustration, fear, anger); the misgiv-
ings arose when participants pondered how they felt about surveillance more
than when they thought of surveillance. Chapter
10 discusses self-censorship,
orthodoxy, and the ethical challenges of interviewing in a country where
many topics are considered political, such that the researcher and the partici-
pant sometimes ‘dance’ around political speak and propaganda.
The conclusion highlights the contributions of this book to the understand-
ing of digital surveillance in contemporary China. First, this book identifies
the tension between participants’ narratives on surveillance as indispensable
and the mental and emotional weight that living with surveillance bears on

Introduction 11
them. Second, this book qualifies these narratives underlying digital surveil-
lance in China as systemic, polycontextual, and deeply moral. These takea-
ways have important implications for Chinese studies as well as surveillance
studies in other country contexts.
Notes
1 Arne Hintz, Lina Dencik, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Digital Citizenship in a
Datafied Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018); Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other:
Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal
of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015); Kirstie Ball, “Exposure: Exploring
the Subject of Surveillance,” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 5
(2009); Mikkel Flyverbom, Ronald Deibert, and Dirk Matten, “The Governance
of Digital Technology, Big Data, and the Internet: New Roles and Responsibilities
for Business,” Business & Society 58, no. 1 (2019).
2 Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2015).
3 Min Jiang, “A Brief Prehistory of China’s Social Credit System,” Communication
and the Public 5, no. 3–4 (2020).
4 Rogier Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Con-
trol,” Anthropology & Archaeology Research Network Research (2018): 1–32;
Genia Kostka and Lukas Antoine, “Fostering Model Citizenship,” Policy & Inter-
net 12, no. 3 (2019); Fan Liang, Vishnupriya Das, Nadiya Kostyuk, and Muzam-
mil M. Hussain, “Constructing a Data-Driven Society: China’s Social Credit System as a State Surveillance Infrastructure,” Policy & Internet 10, no. 4 (2018).
5 Yu-Jie Chen, Zhifei Mao, and Jack Linchuan Qiu, Super-Sticky WeChat and Chi-
nese Society (Bingley: Emerald, 2018).
6 Ibid.
7 Iman Ghosh, “Mapping the State of Facial Recognition Around the World,”
May 22, 2020, www.visualcapitalist.com/facial-recognition-world-map/.
8 Jeff Ding, “ChinAI #143: 2021 AI Company Ranking,” https://chinai.substack.
com/p/chinai-143-2021-ai-company-rankings.
9 Saif Shahin and Pei Zheng, “Big Data and the Illusion of Choice: Comparing the
Evolution of India’s Aadhaar and China’s Social Credit System as Technosocial Discourses,” Social Science Computer Review 38, no. 1 (2020).
10 Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System.”
11 This document is translated on Rogier Creemers’ website, https://chinacopyright-
andmedia.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/state-council-guiding-opinions-concern
ing-establishing-and-perfecting-incentives-for-promise-keeping-and-joint-pun
ishment-systems-for-trust-breaking-and-accelerating-the-construction-of-social-
sincer/.
12 Marcella Siqueira Cassiano, “China’s Hukou Platform: Windows into the Fam-
ily,” Surveillance & Society 17, no. 1–2 (2019); Liang et al., “Constructing a
Data-Driven Society.”
13 Chuncheng Liu and Ross Graham, “Making Sense of Algorithms: Relational Per-
ception of Contact Tracing and Risk Assessment During Covid-19,” Big Data &
Society 8, no. 1 (2021).
14 China Internet Network Information Center, “The 46th Statistical Report on
Internet Development in China,” 2021, https://www.cnnic.com.cn.
15 Yongxi Chen and Anne S. Y. Cheung, “The Transparent Self Under Big Data Pro-
filing: Privacy and Chinese Legislation on the Social Credit System,” Journal of
Comparative Law 12, no. 2 (2017).
16 Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System,” 27.

12 Introduction
17 Genia Kostka, “China’s Social Credit Systems and Public Opinion: Explaining
High Levels of Approval,” New Media & Society 21, no. 7 (2019); Chuncheng
Liu, “Who Supports Expanding Surveillance? Exploring Public Opinion of Chi-
nese Social Credit Systems,” International Sociology 37, no. 3 (2022); Mo Chen
and Jens Grossklags, “Social Control in the Digital Transformation of Society:
A Case Study of the Chinese Social Credit System,” Social Sciences no. 11 (2022);
Marc Oliver Rieger, Mei Wang, and Mareike Ohlberg, “What Do Young Chinese
Think about Social Credit? It’s Complicated,” MERICS Report, 2020, https://
merics.org/en/report/what-do-young-chinese-think-about-social-credit-its-com
plicated; Zheng Su, Xu Xu, and Xun Cao, “What Explains Popular Support for
Government Monitoring in China?” Journal of Information Technology & Poli-
tics 19, no. 4 (2022).
18 David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2018), 42.
19 Kirstie Ball, MariaLaura Di Domenico, and Daniel Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance
and the Body-Subject,” Body & Society 22, no. 2 (2016).
20 Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” The
British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000).
21 Liang et al., “Constructing a Data-Driven Society.”
22 Anne S. Tsui, Sushil S. Nifadkar, and Amy Y. Ou, “Cross-National, Cross-Cultural
Organizational Behavior Research: Advances, Gaps, and Recommendations,” Journal of Management 33 (2007); Debra L. Shapiro, Mary Ann Von Glinow, and Zhixing Xiao, “Toward Polycontextually Sensitive Research Methods,” Man-
agement & Organization Review 3, no. 1 (2007); Ariane Ollier-Malaterre and
Annie Foucreault, “Cross-National Work-Life Research: Cultural and Structural Impacts for Individuals and Organizations,” Journal of Management 43, no. 1 (2017).
23 Marc Maurice, “Convergence and/or Societal Effect for the Europe of the Future?”
in Work and Employment in Europe: A New Convergence?, ed. Peter Cressey
and Bryn Jones (London and New York: Routledge 1995), 137–58; Marc Mau- rice and François Sellier, “Societal Analysis of Industrial Relations: A Compari-
son Between France and West Germany,” British Journal of Industrial Relations
17, no. 3 (1979); Marc Maurice, Francois Sellier, and Jean-Jacques Silvestre, The
Social Foundations of Industrial Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).
24 Birgit Pfau-Effinger, “Changing Welfare States and Labour Markets in the Con-
text of European Gender Arrangements,” in Changing Labour Markets, Welfare
Policies and Citizenship, ed. Jørgen Goul Andersen and Per H. Jensen (Bristol:
Policy Press, Scholarship Online, 2012).
25 Tsui, Nifadkar, and Ou, “Cross-National, Cross-Cultural Organizational Behav-
ior Research.”
26 Shapiro et al., “Toward Polycontextually Sensitive Research Methods,” 144.
27 Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese
Politics and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), xii.
28 Christian Fuchs, “Baidu, Weibo and Renren: The Global Political Economy of
Social Media in China,” Asian Journal of Communication 26, no. 1 (2016).
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Shapiro et al., “Toward Polycontextually Sensitive Research Methods.”
32 Jean-François Billeter, Pourquoi l’Europe. Réflexions d’un sinologue (Paris: Édi-
tions Allia, 2020).
33 Victor Louzon, Le grand récit chinois. L’invention d’un destin mondial (Paris:
Taillandier, 2023).

Introduction 13
34 Gerlinde Groitl, “China’s Dream: Constructive Revisionism for Great Rejuve-
nation,” in Russia, China and the Revisionist Assault on the Western Liberal
International Order (Cham: Palgrave Studies in International Relations, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2023), 371–427, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18659-2_9.
35 Jean-François Billeter, Contre François Jullien (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2017); Jean-
François Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, essai sur l’histoire contemporaine et la Chine (Paris: Éditions Allia, 2016); Jean-François Billeter, “La civilisation Chi-
noise,” in Histoire des mœurs, ed. Jean Poirier (Paris: Folio Histoire Gallimard, 1991); Jean-Pierre Cabestan, Demain la Chine: Démocratie ou Dictature? (Paris: Le Débat, Gallimard, 2018); Anne Cheng, Penser en Chine (Paris: Folio Histoire
Gallimard, 2021); Danielle Elisseeff, Histoire de la Chine: Les racines du présent
(Monaco: Les éditions du Rocher, 2003); Jean-Louis Rocca, La société chinoise
vue par ses sociologues (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008); Alain Wang, Les
Chinois (Paris: Tallandier, 2018); Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation.
36 David Ownby, www.readingthechinadream.com/about.html.
37 Cindy Yu, www.spectator.co.uk/podcasts/chinese-whispers.
38 Jeff Ding, ChinAI Newsletter, https://chinai.substack.com/.
39 Graham Sewell, Surveillance: A Key Idea for Business and Society (London and
New York: Routledge, 2021).

PART I
Privacy, surveillance, and
the social credit systems

DOI: 10.4324/9781003403876-3
Let me first introduce how privacy is defined in China and point out the
differing connotations in language between the Chinese and English words.
The public and the private domains of life have been discussed as early as in
the Warring States period (475–221 bce) in China.
1
However, Chinese and
Western scholars note that there is no Chinese-specific equivalent to the West-
ern conceptions of privacy grounded in the primacy of individual autonomy
and intimacy,
2
because the Confucianist and Taoist philosophies are based
on different premises. Therefore, the Western conceptions were imported in
China in the late Qing period (1840–1912), and current Chinese scholarship
on privacy and surveillance mostly uses Western frameworks, despite dif-
ferences in socio-economic and political contexts.
3
For this reason, I review
these constructs based on both Chinese and Western scholarship.
Privacy
Privacy in Chinese scholarship
Privacy can be written in two different ways in Mandarin. One term is yīnsī
(a shameful secret you need to hide 阴私), and the other is yǐnsī (secrets,
personal things you do not wish to disclose in public, 隐私),
4
which is closer
to the Western meaning of privacy. In the first term, yīn (阴) designates a
range of notions including the negative principle in the yin-yang duality, the
shade, and female genitalia. In the second term, yǐn (隐) has the more neutral
meaning of hide, conceal, although meanings in Mandarin depend on the
context in the sentence. In both, sī (私) means private, confidential
5
and may
also have a derogatory connotation,
6
by contrast with gong (public), a term
1
PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE

18 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
associated with moral qualities.
7
Confusion persists between the two mean-
ings of privacy in Mandarin. For instance, even an authoritative law diction-
ary defines both terms as ‘cases of which the contents offend public decency’
and cites rape, sexual relations with minors, sodomy, and prostitution as
examples of private matters.
8
The Analects of Confucius discusses the public and the private domains
of life as early as the Warring States period before the unification of China.
9

However, the Chinese conceptions of privacy have different philosophical
roots than the Western ones and tend to subordinate the personal realm to the
public realm.
10
Confucianism puts an emphasis on family relationships, in the
service of finding one’s rightful place within a natural social hierarchy rather
than in the pursuit of intimacy.
11
Early Confucianism viewed the private
realm (si) as residual in relation to the public realm (gong), not unlike ancient
Greece and Rome.
12
Taoism does encourage inwardness and concealment, as
the Tao itself is said to be hidden. However, early Taoism did not conceive
of family life or friendship as self-contained parts of life essential to per-
sonal growth; rather than achieving individual uniqueness, the goal was to go
beyond oneself.
13
While both Confucianism and Taoism value self-cultivation,
they do not consider that the value of self-cultivation lies in individuals gain-
ing freedom from social norms and developing distinctive values and beliefs.
14

The late Qing period saw the private realm gain legitimacy in some aspects;
it, however, remained associated with selfishness, while the public realm was
infused with public-mindedness.
15
In fact, some argue that ‘the importation of Western privacy laws has
prevented China from developing its own sui generis privacy legal culture’.
16

This importation began in the late Qing period
17
; however, communal liv-
ing and collectivised property in the communist People’s Republic of China
obscured discussions on privacy as a protection against the intrusion of the
state and the community.
18
Civil law scholars took a renewed interest to privacy alongside Deng Xiaop-
ing’s economic reforms in the 1990s.
19
A milestone was a 1997 book edited
by Wang Limin and Yang Lixin titled The Law of the Rights of The Person
that proposed the definition of privacy adopted by the Civil Code in 2002,
as a ‘right enjoyed by a natural person, under which the person is free from
publicity and any interference by others with personal matters’.
20
However,
legal cases have more often been based on the right to reputation or the right
to portrait than on the right to privacy.
21
This may change with recent regu-
lations: the Civil Code’s revision in 2020 defines privacy as ‘the tranquillity
of natural private persons’ lives, and private and confidential (simi) spaces,
activities and information that they do not wish others to know about’.
22
Within Chinese academia, social science scholars have primarily focused
on consumer privacy, and there is little research on privacy as it relates to
surveillance.
23

Privacy and surveillance 19
Privacy in Western scholarship
In Western societies, Hannah Arendt traced discussions on privacy back to
ancient Greece.
24
However, it wasn’t until the 18th and 19th industrial revo-
lutions that the distinction between the public and the private spheres gained
importance and modern private life emerged, around families whose bod-
ily and affective activities became subtracted from public sight.
25
Philosophy
professor Ferdinand Schoeman associates the rising significance of privacy
and intimacy with that of the nuclear family and of the state, which reduced
individuals’ dependence on kin groups.
26
An early definition of privacy as
‘the right to be let alone’ was proposed in 1890.
27
Westin’s classic definition
from 1967 is the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to decide what
information about themselves to communicate to others and when and how
to do so.
28
Simply put, privacy pertains to ‘what people conceal and reveal
and what others acquire and ignore’.
29
Nowadays, the lines between the public and private spheres have become
increasingly blurred
30
and information systems scholars think of privacy in a
finer-grained way. The seminal work of Helen Nissenbaum
31
argues that peo-
ple think contextually rather than in dichotomic public versus private terms.
In other words, privacy expectations depend on norms of appropriateness,
on the relationships at play, and the goals of the information sharing – for
instance, the information a person may share on a dating application is dif-
ferent from what they disclose on a workplace social network. Privacy is
threatened when technologies violate contextual integrity, that is, a person’s
expectations about where their information will flow, for instance, when
their information is shared or aggregated beyond the initial context.
Privacy has long been cast as an individual concern to be balanced with
common good objectives such as security (detecting and preventing terror-
ist threats) or public health (fighting off a pandemic). In this view, which is
not very different from the Chinese pejorative focus on privacy as hiding
shameful behaviours, privacy tends to be framed as a person’s selfish and
morally dubious interest, weighing less than collective objectives.
32
However,
the trade-off between privacy and security has been criticised by prominent
privacy scholars on the grounds that privacy is interdependent, collective,
and a common good as well.
To begin, privacy in interdependent insofar as it is ‘networked’
33
: as social
media scholars Alice Marwick and danah boyd frame it, privacy is a collabo-
ration with others within a social context. We cannot fully control what is
known about us, because others in our networks may also disclose informa-
tion about us,
34
and social media or e-commerce platforms may share our
information with other users or third parties. Therefore, even individuals
who carefully control what they disclose can be affected by the actions of oth-
ers. For example, when a friend hands over their phone at an international

20 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
border, the photos and emails that we have sent to that person, as well as our
social media interactions, can be accessed by border agents and stored for
later use.
35
‘Group privacy’ is another useful construct. First, individuals construct
their identities in relation to social groups, forming social identities at the
intersection of gender, race, social class, and other affiliations
36
; second, algo-
rithmic sorting is also aimed at groups.
37
Anuj Puri’s doctoral research argues
that group privacy starts with individuals’ right to form their social identities
without being prejudiced by algorithmic manipulations of the information
presented to them on social media. It continues with the group’s right to be
protected against algorithmic sorting and therefore the right of the individual
not to be identified with certain groups.
38
Along these lines, several scholars have established the social value of pri-
vacy as a common good. Daniel Solove famously rebutted the ‘I’ve got noth-
ing to hide’ argument according to which only those engaging in unlawful
activities should be concerned with privacy. A comment he quotes will help
readers grasp what is at stake: ‘If you have nothing to hide, then that quite
literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full
rights to that photograph – so I can show it to your neighbors?’.
39
Building
on John Dewey’s work, Solove notes that individuals are not separate from
society and that privacy serves to maintain social order as much as to protect
individuals from social control.
40
Priscilla Regan also contests the simplistic
dichotomy opposing the individual and the society, pointing out that the
greatest threats to privacy in modern society stem from techniques used by
private and governmental organisations, rather than individuals.
41
She argues
that large social and economic organisations are distinct from society as a
whole and common good suffers when such organisations, who hold power
on individuals, undermine their privacy: for instance, individuals have little
or no latitude to provide personal information to tax agencies or to have
their medical records sent to insurance companies for payment. Drawing on
philosophy, political science, and economy, Regan frames privacy as holding
a common, collective, and public value: common in that people all have an
interest in privacy even if they differ in what they view as private, collective in
that like clean air, it is difficult for anyone to have privacy unless everyone has
a minimum level of privacy, and public because without privacy, individuals
cannot exercise their individuality and civil rights, such that the public sphere
becomes shallow and democracy is undermined.
42
Public policy should there-
fore protect privacy, which requires an elucidation of the various collectives
that need protection from social groups that hold power over them: what
Charles Raab terms opening the black box of ‘society’.
43
Indeed, privacy serves many functions in interpersonal relationships and
in society, which sociologists Denise Anthony and her colleagues synthesise
clearly.
44
First, as social psychologist Irwin Altman established, privacy is

Privacy and surveillance 21
instrumental in regulating interpersonal boundaries and optimizing the
amount and type of disclosures about oneself.
45
For instance, sharing per-
sonal information with a new friend means that we trust the friend enough
to make ourselves vulnerable to them: our disclosures may build a closer
relationship with that person. However, sharing too much information or
the wrong type of information, or sharing it too quickly, may damage the
relationship.
Second, keeping information within a social group increases the group’s
cohesion and sets boundaries towards members of the out-group: for
instance, when teenagers share information with their peers but hide it from
their families, they signal their affiliation to their peer group and keep out
their families.
46
Privacy norms generally imply limiting strangers’ access to
one’s information, as well as refraining from accessing strangers’ informa-
tion.
47
In other words, privacy has an important socialisation function.
48
Third, the ability to choose what to conceal and what to reveal, and to
whom, allows us to present ourselves to different social groups in ways that
are socially accepted. We each belong to different social groups that may have
distinct social norms and we navigate these affiliations all day long. Soci-
ologist Erving Goffman pointed out that we present ourselves according to
appropriateness norms in different private and public contexts. In his words,
we wear different masks on the front versus back stages to perform credible
shows on both and be accepted by others.
49
This performance implies we
adapt our behaviours to the audience; for instance, we may dress, speak,
and behave differently in a formal work setting than at a casual dinner with
friends. Self-presentation may sometimes imply some degree of misrepre-
sentation, such as when we conceal actions that are inconsistent with the
audience’s standards, or when we exaggerate a trait or behaviour to meet
expectations. However, people also need validation of the ways in which
they see themselves and may therefore choose to behave authentically even if
doing so does not enhance their image.
50
Lastly, privacy serves the controversial function of enabling the powerful
in society to maintain their status and legitimacy. For instance, governments
keep some information secret from citizens and similarly, employers conceal
certain types of information from employees. More generally, people are not
equal with regard to privacy: children have less privacy than parents, sick
persons have less privacy than healthy ones, and poor persons have less pri-
vacy than rich ones.
51
Surveillance
Surveillance has been a persistent fact of life in human societies, and famous
thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen discussed it already in the
18th and beginning of 19th centuries.
52
The contemporary field of surveillance

22 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
studies emerged in the 1980s after the publication of seminal work by Michel
Foucault and James Rule and accelerated after the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
53
Surveillance, a term that derives from the Latin ‘super’ (meaning ‘over’)
and ‘vigilantia’ (meaning ‘watchfulness’), implies watching over someone,
usually to bring about or prevent behaviours.
54
Parents watch over children,
supervisors watch over employees, and police officers watch over people in
public spaces.
55
Although the act of surveillance most often assumes a power
differential between those who surveil and those who are surveilled, peers
can also watch each other, for instance, in work teams or on social media
(lateral surveillance
56
or social surveillance
57
) and workers can watch bosses
(sousveillance
58
).
Physical surveillance is an age-old phenomenon: if prisons
59
and work-
places
60
have been extensively studied, streets and public spaces, schools,
apartment buildings, neighbourhoods, cities, and many other physical set-
tings are also monitored.
61
In recent decades, the growing digitalisation of
everyday life brought about ‘dataveillance’ that can be conducted remotely
and in continuous real-time.
62
As such, David Lyon defines surveillance as
‘the collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not,
for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been
garnered’.
63
As it explicit from this definition, surveillance ensures conform-
ity to social norms, rules, and commercial interests, and is in tension with
individual freedoms and privacy because it achieves this effect by controlling
and influencing individual behaviour. In other words, surveillance carries
with it value systems and normativities on how one should live one’s life.
64
What is being harvested are the digital traces we leave when our mobile
phone shares geolocation data, when we search the web, shop online, post on
social media, pay electronically for a bus or taxi fare, wear a fitness tracker,
fill our ‘smart home’ with sensors, or walk down a street that is equipped
with facial recognition cameras. Some of these traces are data (such as when
a customer fills in an online form with their name, address, and payment
details) and some are metadata (such as the routing information contained
in the headers of emails or text messages, or geolocation information hidden
in a digital photograph).
65
These traces can be collected, stored, shared, and
harvested by online operators, data brokers, intelligence agencies, and public
administrations.
66
Taken together, these multiple actors and processes form ‘surveillance
assemblages’,
67
which are far more layered than the simplistic idea of a ‘Big
Brother’ watching us or the centralised panopticon imagined by Jeremy
Bentham. In many cases, there is no personalised connection between the
watcher and the watched, making surveillance ‘liquid’ as exposed by David
Lyon.
68
As noted by Kirstie Ball, the co-director and founder of the Centre
for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy, and her colleagues,
the absence of a direct gaze and of a direct relationship between watchers

Privacy and surveillance 23
and watched does not preclude embodied proximity to surveillance, as ‘the
surveilled subject is now much more closely but sometimes unknowingly
enmeshed in surveillance assemblages and subject to multiple lines of sight’.
69

Indeed, our everyday activities and interactions with friends, families, cow-
orkers, and other members of our social networks trigger data streams that
flow to corporations, governmental agencies, and other bodies.
70
Before I detail the historical roots of surveillance in China in Chapter 2,
I wish to familiarise the readers with the implications of surveillance. I focus
on reciprocal surveillance emanating from other individuals and groups,
commercial surveillance emanating from corporations, and state surveillance
emanating from governments, as these forms apply to everyone.
Reciprocal surveillance
A reciprocal surveillance culture has developed with the advent of social
media in the late 1990s, as many people have a visible presence on the inter-
net, either because they post or comment on social media, write a personal
blog, and post videos on YouTube, or because pictures and videos of them are
uploaded by others. A discourse equating sharing with caring has emerged
which deprecates shy, reserved, or guarded attitudes. As the media and digi-
tal society professor José Van Dijck noted a decade ago, the default approach
for social media users is transparency, even though the underlying algorithms
remain hidden.
71
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (Meta), advo-
cates authenticity and real-name policies; he views having different identities
on social media as a lack of integrity.
72
This rhetoric on authenticity and
transparency is clearly illustrated in Dave Eggers’ book The Circle, where
a young Mae Holland ends up wearing a camera strapped to her body and
happily shares her entire life with her fans.
73
While transparency has been heralded as a way to combat the secrecy
under which the powerful maintain their privilege,
74
this rhetoric obscures
the social control and information asymmetry characteristic of social media.
75

In addition, transparency can backfire: my own research showed that openly
sharing everything with everyone on social media, where one is ‘friends’ with
people from different social worlds, such as family and friends, coworkers,
bosses, and clients, can backfire in the workplace and even ruin careers.
76

Transparency on social media may also divide families and friendships; some-
times it is better not to know much about other people’s lifestyle, values, and
political opinions.
Commercial surveillance
As early as 1993, Oscar Gandy, a scholar of the political economy of infor-
mation, analysed the ways in which corporations capture the surplus value of

24 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
our non-productive labour, that is the personal data we generate every time
we search the internet, click on a link, watch a video, buy a product, order
food online, or rate a movie.
77
Big Data and algorithms enable commercial
companies to collect, sell, and mine these data to create individual behav-
ioural profiles, or virtual data doubles, that can be used, among others, in
targeted advertising, credit management, insurance, or recommender systems
(e.g. on retail and entertainment platforms). Increasingly, public–private
partnerships extend this ‘panoptic sort’ to citizens as they access welfare and
social services.
78
Big Data profiling and predictions rely on the increasing sophistication of
algorithms: with an accumulation of 300 ‘likes’, Facebook can predict the
personality traits of their users more accurately than their close kin can. The
algorithm needs just ten ‘likes’ to make a better prediction than a coworker,
70 to out-perform a roommate, 150 to out-perform a parent or sibling, and
300 to out-perform a spouse.
79
Algorithms can also identify key events in a
person’s life, such as when they get pregnant or divorced, and help compa-
nies advertise to targeted customers according to these events. Different pric-
ing for the same products and services can also be fine-tuned according to
market-based segmentations; for instance, different internet users may view
different prices depending on their location, the browser they use, or the
speed of their connection.
80
Such profiling is a major source of profits and a
driver of what sociologist Shoshana Zuboff termed ‘surveillance capitalism’.
81
State surveillance
States also profile citizens in the domains of education, children’s services,
social welfare, health, crime, and immigration. Data can be collected offline
and online, directly by governments or indirectly via third parties. The
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology found that the United
States federal, state, and local law enforcement use facial recognition to run
searches in their databases of drivers’ licence and ID photos in at least 26
states, covering 117 million people.
82
Some cities have developed extensive
surveillance programmes based on facial recognition; for instance, the Pro-
ject Greenlight Detroit launched in 2016 centralises camera feeds into the
police Real Time Crime Center. These cameras are installed in public spaces
as well as in late-night businesses, addiction treatment clinics, reproductive
health and family planning clinics, churches, schools, apartment buildings,
and hotels.
83
Other United States cities, however, have banned the use of
facial recognition. Another example of data collection by governments is the
datamining by the Department of Homeland Security of the social media
profiles of 15 million travellers per year, when agents vet visa applications
that include the applicants’ social media handles.
84
One illustration of the
way that states may collect data through corporations is that of Australian

Privacy and surveillance 25
communication service providers, which are mandated to log 2 years of
their customers’ location data and online activities.
85
Governments may also
access the data collected by private companies in opaque ways. As shown by
the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the United States National Secu-
rity Agency can read emails, monitor phone calls and online chats, track web
browsing and browsing histories, monitor social media activity and contact
networks, and even follow the screens of individual computers.
86
Artificial intelligence and datafication, that is, the fact that everything
people do leaves data traces that can be stored and used,
87
open up the pos-
sibility of a governance grounded in the profiling, sorting, and categorising
of populations, based on their consumption habits, political preferences, or
the likelihood of their breaking the law.
88
The Data Justice Lab at Cardiff
University conducted case studies of citizen scoring in the United King-
dom in welfare programmes as well as in predictive policing. For instance,
the Avon and Somerset Police are partners with private analytics compa-
nies such as Qlik Sense to integrate public service databases and compute
individual ‘offender risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ scores. The city of Bristol uses
algorithmic profiling to manage welfare programmes. The Camden Resi-
dent Index provides a ‘single view of the citizen’, fed by 16 different munici-
pal databases, which facilitates the detection of illegal subletting or fraud
in school admission and parking permit applications. Some United King-
dom cities also use geo-demographic segmentation tools that were origi-
nally meant for marketing purposes, such as Mosaic by the consumer credit
agency Experian. This tool categorises citizens according to their demo-
graphic information such as age and gender as well as the neighbourhood
where they live (examples of group classifications in Mosaic are ‘aspiring
homemakers’, ‘families with needs’, and ‘dependent greys’
89
). Such inte-
grated profiling forms the basis of a ‘digital citizenship’ that determines the
level of public and private services that we receive, or the ease with which
we may cross borders; sometimes we are not even aware that our digital
profile has opened or closed doors for us.
90
State surveillance is a worldwide reality, although to differing degrees and
in different socio-political contexts. European intelligence agencies also pro-
file their citizens.
91
Estonia’s e-government infrastructure has set up a national
database and online ID cards that aim to promote ‘trust’ and prevent unde-
sirable citizen behaviours.
92
Moreover, Global South scholars are increasingly
researching the rise of surveillance outside Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. Examples include India, which is
developing a social credit system called Aadhaar that aims at curbing cor-
ruption in the transfer of welfare benefits,
93
and many African countries that
digitalize the identification of citizens, as in Ghana where the provision of
public services and benefits is subsumed to a person’s Ghana card with a SIM
card and a digital address registered to it.
94

26 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
Surveillance on a continuum between care and control
Surveillance technologies may be used with different objectives and outcomes.
On the one hand, surveillance technologies can enhance people’s health, liv-
ing conditions, and safety. A vast body of literature documents the many
advantages of technology for individuals and societies when they are used to
their benefits (see, for instance, the work of sociologist Deborah Lupton on
fitness trackers such as Apple watches or Fitbits that enable people to moni-
tor their own health and that of their elders).
95
Location data transmitted
by mobile phones have assisted governments in determining the effective-
ness of COVID-19 lockdowns or the potential for contamination in several
countries, including China and Vietnam.
96
Likewise, the government of Togo
has enrolled the expertise of a Berkeley professor, Joshua Blumenstock, to
identify citizens most in need of financial support due to the pandemic. The
system determines who is eligible to receive aid, based on satellite images
analysing roads, house roofs, and access to water, and on cell phone data
indicating individuals’ international calls and the ratio of initiated versus
received calls.
97
On the other hand, surveillance technologies can be leveraged by corpora-
tions and governments to channel, control, and mold consumers and citizens.
Privacy risks are one of the most obvious implications of surveillance. In a
recent book, the labour history and privacy law professor Lawrence Cap-
pello explains the perils of recording everything, giving the example of casual
private interactions:
People take more care in their writing than they do with their impromptu
speech and actions. Casual speech often includes offhand comments, par-
tial observations, sarcasm, and false sentiments, to avoid an argument,
for instance. To have such conversations made public is potentially cata-
strophic to privacy.
98
He also argues that anyone who is watched for long enough may be caught
in some form of illegal or immoral activity that can be used against them.
When a person discloses information such as their name, gender, date of
birth, address, and sometimes even more sensitive information such as their
social security number, to access services on the web, this information may
be transferred for secondary use without that person giving their consent
(e.g. a platform sells their data), and it can be improperly accessed and used
by unauthorised persons (e.g. for unwanted solicitations or identity theft).
99

Even anonymized datasets are no guarantee of privacy. In a recent study,
scholars reverse engineered an American ‘anonymized’ dataset and were able
to re-identify correctly 99.98 per cent of the people in the dataset.
100
The
dataset had just 15 variables, such as date of birth and gender, per individual.
As Luc Roger, the first author of the study, said in an interview:

Privacy and surveillance 27
While there might be a lot of people who are in their thirties, male, and liv-
ing in New York City, far fewer of them were also born on 5 January, are
driving a red sports car, and live with two kids (both girls) and one dog.
101
While many people appreciate the convenience of the internet in daily life,
including the helpfulness of targeted recommendations, concerns have been
voiced over leakages of the personal data entrusted to large corporations
such as Meta or PayPal. Users often do not explicitly consent to the surrepti-
tious gathering of their personal data.
102
Moreover, problematic practices to
which users have not given their consent, such as the possible recording of
home conversations by devices such as Alexa and Siri, or the use of cookies
and invisible web beacons by online advertising companies, exist.
103
Other concerns pertain to errors and discrimination. Numerous facial rec-
ognition and algorithmic decision-making errors have been documented. For
instance, facial recognition does not work equally well for all; a MIT thesis
found that three common facial-analysis systems showed an error rate of
34.7 per cent for dark-skinned women compared with 0.8 per cent for light-
skinned men.
104
Researchers who worked with the London Police reported
that the matches using live facial recognition between people in public spaces
and people on watchlists were correct only 19 per cent of the time over the
period 2016–2019.
105
They were also concerned with the lack of clarity on
criteria to place individuals on watchlists. Another example is the Australian
Robodebt debacle in 2016–2017, when automated decision-making software
erroneously flagged thousands of social security recipients as having received
higher benefits than they were entitled to.
106
Moreover, profiling may rely on stereotyping social groups deemed at risk
of committing a crime or being a victim of a crime. It may, therefore, increase
social discrimination and digital inequality.
107
Such discrimination can be
imperceptible, when decisions are made because of small indicators in vast
datasets. For instance, some algorithms record the browser that job appli-
cants use and favour applicants who use a newer kind of browser because
there is a correlation (not a causality!) between using a newer browser and
spending more time working.
108
Thus, job applicants with older browsers
may be passed over for a job interview without even realising why. Carissa
Veliz, a privacy scholar at Oxford University, gives another example in her
book Privacy is Power: a young woman may go online to buy a book on
getting pregnant and be discriminated against in a job interview a couple
months later, without ever making the connection between the digital trace
she left when ordering the book and the decision not to offer her the job.
109
The imbalance in power between individuals, corporations, and govern-
ments is particularly problematic in authoritarian regimes because surveil-
lance can be used as a political control and repression tool, as is currently
the case in several Chinese provinces including Xinjiang.
110
The imbalance

28 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
could be mitigated, to some extent, by increasing transparency and account-
ability so that citizens understand how data are being collected, stored, dis-
seminated, and mined, and have effective means to consent or withdraw
from the process, and to redress errors arising from it.
111
However, it took
decades for privacy rights to emerge in Europe and North America. While
the European Union created a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
that applies to all European and non-European corporations interacting with
European Union residents, privacy legislation in most countries lags behind
corporate practices.
112
To date, the United States still does not have a unified
legal framework that may be able to deal with the current datafication of
society.
113
The much-awaited Chinese Personal Information Protection Law
(2021) compares with the GDPR in many aspects, providing strong protec-
tion in principle
114
; however, its implementation is largely left to corpora-
tions’ discretion.
115
Moreover, several loopholes in the law may exempt state
agencies from notifying citizens of data collection and obtaining their con-
sent when they may evoke state secrecy (article 19) or when doing so would
impede their ability to fulfil their duties and responsibilities (article 35).
116
In
line with the instrumental and teleological legal environment in China, the
law does not institute a fundamental right and subordinates privacy to the
rule of the Communist Party of China.
117
Perceptions of privacy and surveillance
People care about privacy
While people are generally aware that data collection and data mining exist,
most lack a specific understanding of how this works. Many individuals
develop a ‘surveillance imaginary’, which is a mental image of surveillance
and of adequate ways to cope with it.
118
In the United Kingdom and the
United States, about 80 per cent of people report that they care about their
privacy, with younger people and women being more concerned than older
people and men.
119
United Kingdom surveys indicate that most people know
that they leave traces when they search the internet, visit websites, and buy
online (68, 68, and 70 per cent, respectively); far fewer know that data about
their internet connection and protocol (38 per cent) and information other
people share about them (17 per cent) are also collected.
120
In addition, people tend to worry more about privacy violations by family
members, friends, and employers than by corporations and governments.
121

A review of United Kingdom and United States studies indicates that the
entities people are most likely to trust are healthcare institutions, followed by
banks and local governments; they are much less likely to trust retailers, and
even less so marketing organisations and social media companies.
122
How-
ever, qualitative studies note ambivalence as consumers resent the intrusion

Privacy and surveillance 29
by targeted advertisements yet find it pleasant to be ‘recognised’ by such tar-
geting and appreciate real-time recommendations when they are relevant.
123

Additional factors affecting the public acceptance of surveillance are the
perceived need for surveillance,
124
trust in the government,
125
and perceived
benevolence, competence and integrity of the agency operating the surveil-
lance.
126
For instance, a 2019 United Kingdom survey found that 71 per cent
of people supported police use of face recognition in public spaces to reduce
crime. However, support for other uses was lower: 70 per cent believed face
recognition should not be used in schools, only 22 per cent believed it should
be allowed on public transportation, and only 7 per cent approved its use in
supermarkets to track shopper behaviour.
127
Privacy apathy or chilling effects?
We may take many steps to protect our data: for instance, change our pass-
words often, paste tape on phone and computer cameras, use a VPN to surf
the internet (a Virtual Private Network disguises one’s identity and encrypts
internet traffic), switch to providers who promise greater privacy, such as
ProtonMail and duckduckgo.com, or abstain from using cloud storage or
universal logins (e.g. Google and Facebook). We can also try to outsmart
data collection organisations by committing ‘privacy lies’: half of United
States teenagers have provided false information on social media profiles and
40 per cent of internet users report they have lied to commercial websites.
128
However, many of those who are concerned about their privacy do not
take these steps, which has been termed the ‘privacy paradox’.
129
Some schol-
ars believe this paradox stems from privacy apathy
130
or cynicism.
131
Others
argue that it is not indifference, but resignation: in response to the normalisa-
tion of surveillance practices in everyday life, people feel they have no choice
but to live with it; ‘digital resignation’ is a rational response to the lack of
control.
132
Still other scholars challenge these views and argue that when peo-
ple are aware of the digital traces they leave and start thinking about their
potential consequences, they become wary of what they say and do. This is
called the ‘chilling effect’ and can result in self-censorship, self-restraint, and
silence.
133
People anticipate what the consequences of their behaviours may
be and behave more carefully when there is no certain way to assess what
will be considered controversial or disruptive, and what the legal and extra-
legal consequences may be. For instance, a person may refrain from posting
a comment on a news article online, or they may modify their behaviour at a
party in anticipation of their picture being posted online.
134
An early case of
such ‘anticipatory obedience’
135
to norms and expectations was observed in
studies on web searches: immediately following Edward Snowden’s 2013 rev-
elations that the United States National Security Agency was screening web
searches for specific suspicious keywords such as ‘bomb’, Wikipedia articles

30 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
related to terrorism and other topics containing these keywords were much
less often read.
136
Indeed, people avoid seeking out information when they
know they are being monitored, even if the mere act of reading an article does
not constitute a crime.
137
A set of cross-national studies in 21 and 63 coun-
tries concluded that, perhaps as a result of these chilling effects, censorship
is more detrimental to democratisation in countries where state surveillance
is high.
138
Therefore, law professor Paul Bernal contends that data collection
and surveillance by corporations and states impact not only on individual
privacy but also on freedom of speech, assembly, and association.
139
In China, awareness and advocacy for privacy are growing
Privacy is a fundamental right in the Chinese Constitution
140
and is protected
by law in public trials and judgements.
141
Several voices, including those from
governmental bodies, have expressed concern about privacy risks related to
commercial and state surveillance. In response to public demands for protec-
tion against abuse and the misappropriation of user data by companies, four
government agencies launched a privacy policy audit of ten internet service
companies, including WeChat and Alipay, in 2017.
142
The 2017 Cyber Secu-
rity Law included privacy rules, which have been refined in the 2018 Per-
sonal Information Security Specification.
143
In 2019, several companies were
blacklisted for excessive collection of personal data without user consent.
The government then announced that the business licenses of companies that
did not comply with privacy regulations could be revoked.
144
Reflecting these
concerns, the 2021 Personal Information Protection Law curtails companies’
ability to collect and handle personal information. The law applies to state
agencies as well, addressing citizens’ concern in the wake of pandemic data
collection. As we saw already, the laws’ provisions leave ample discretion
to corporations and state agencies, such that its application remains to be
tested.
145
Studies on privacy literacy and attitudes in China are still rare, and they
are difficult to conduct as the wording of questions is scrutinised by univer-
sity officials and survey sample service providers, who by law must screen out
illegal content including questions viewed as inciting anti-government senti-
ment.
146
A 2019 survey on a small sample of university students found that
their privacy literacy regarding online platforms was low and that there was
no significant correlation between students’ privacy concerns and their inten-
tion to disclose personal information.
147
A 2020 survey among Chinese uni-
versity students in five large cities found that these students, who are among
the heaviest internet users, had extremely poor knowledge about platform
privacy policies. The surveyed students were more concerned about privacy
on commercial platforms than government surveillance. The results regard-
ing the privacy paradox were mixed. On the one hand, those who were most

Privacy and surveillance 31
concerned about commercial and state surveillance were accordingly less
willing to disclose personal information on social media and online service
platforms. However, they did not use social media nor online service plat-
forms less than those who were less concerned. Interestingly, students who
answered a paper-and-pencil survey expressed higher concerns about state
surveillance and lower beliefs in the necessity of government surveillance than
those who provided their answers online, suggesting that respondents who
anticipate scrutiny of their online answers may engage in self-censorship.
148
Chinese citizens approve of digital surveillance more so than
Western citizens
The high approval rates for surveillance technology in several academic
surveys on large Chinese samples have surprised many observers. A study
based on a 2018 nationally representative survey found that 82 per cent of
respondents supported CCTV surveillance and 60 per cent supported email
and internet surveillance.
149
Over 80 per cent of the 2,000 respondents of a
2019 survey either somewhat approved or strongly approved the commer-
cial social credit systems.
150
Across several surveys, approval for the social
credit system is higher among respondents who are more educated, earn a
higher income, and have an urban residence (hukou).
151
Moreover, approval
for the social credit systems is higher in China than in other countries.
152
So is
approval for facial recognition use: in China, 43 per cent of the 2020 World
Values Survey participants believed that the government should ‘definitely’
have the right to keep people under video surveillance in public areas, com-
pared with 35 per cent in the United Kingdom, 26 per cent in Germany, and
23 per cent in the United States. A very low 9 per cent of Chinese respondents
expressed opposition to facial recognition technology, compared with 22 per
cent in the United Kingdom, 25 per cent in the United States, and 31 per cent
in Germany.
153
Likewise, willingness to share personal data through contact
tracing applications in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is also signifi-
cantly higher in China than in the United States and Germany.
154
However, the social credit systems have been under fire from academics
and policy makers, including the original designers of the plan. The concerns
are that a system initially built to restore trust in market economics and focus
on illegal activities now encompasses uncivil and health behaviours, gradu-
ally becoming a ‘moral dossier’ (daode dang’an) by proxy, that is a record
of a person’s moral integrity.
155
Professor Lin Yu, of the Shanghai Academy
of Social Sciences, has argued that social credit should be computed nar-
rowly in line with legal and contractual obligations rather than moral behav-
iour.
156
Politics and international relations professor Chenchen Zhang notes
that the People’s Bank of China itself has been sceptical of the use of social
credit for purposes other than financial and economic.
157
A pilot project that

32 Privacy, surveillance, and the social credit systems
classified citizens into A to D categories in Suining was aborted.
158
In 2020,
the National Development and Reform Commission and the State Council
instructed local officials that all black and red lists need to have a basis in
central legal standards; those that did not meet this requirement would be
ejected from the social credit system.
159
The commercial pilots, too, have
faced a backlash. The government shut down Tencent’s credit system the day
it was launched in 2015. In 2018, Alipay introduced an annual reporting
feature where users gave permission to access their Sesame Credit scores by
default; following an outcry on social media, Alipay quickly apologised and
removed that feature.
160
Lastly, a 2022 qualitative study on a small sample of
Beijing residents suggests that citizens may be ambivalent towards the social
credit systems: while many respondents supported the punishments associ-
ated with the black lists, they also raised the issue of privacy as an important
concern.
161
***
In this chapter, I have aimed to familiarise readers with scholarship on pri-
vacy and surveillance. Since surveillance has a long history in China, it is
also essential to trace its historical roots and explain the socio-economic and
political goals that it serves. I will therefore focus the next chapter on how
surveillance unfolds specifically in China.
Notes
1 Chengyuan Shao, “The Surveillance Experience of Chinese University Students
and the Value of Privacy in the Surveillance Society” (PhD diss., University of
North Carolina, 2020), https://doi.org/10.17615/tr7a-yr90.
2 Cristina B. Whitman, “Privacy in Confucian and Taoist Thought,” in Individual-
ism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist Values, ed. Donald Munro (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1985), 85–100, https://
repository.law.umich.edu/book_chapters/21/.
3 Shao, “The Surveillance Experience of Chinese University Students and the Value
of Privacy in the Surveillance Society.”
4 Jingchung Cao, “Protecting the Right to Privacy in China,” Victoria University of
Wellington Law Review 25 (2005).
5 Pleco online Chinese dictionary.
6 Elaine Yuan, The Web of Meaning: The Internet in a Changing Chinese Society
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).
7 Peter Zarrow, “The Origins of Modern Chinese Concepts of Privacy: Notes on
Social Structure and Moral Discourse,” in Chinese Concepts of Privacy (Leiden,
The Netherlands: Brill, 2002).
8 Cao, “Protecting the Right to Privacy in China.”
9 Shao, “The Surveillance Experience of Chinese University Students and the Value
of Privacy in the Surveillance Society.”
10 Whitman, “Privacy in Confucian and Taoist Thought.”

Privacy and surveillance 33
11 Ibid.
12 Zarrow, “The Origins of Modern Chinese Concepts of Privacy.”
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Tiffany Li, Jill Bronfman, and Zhou Zhou, “Saving Face: Unfolding the Screen of
Chinese Privacy Law,” Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2826087.
17 Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson, eds., Chinese Concepts of Privacy
(Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2022).
18 Li, Bronfman, and Zhou, “Saving Face: Unfolding the Screen of Chinese Privacy
Law.”
19 Cao, “Protecting the Right to Privacy in China.”
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 National People’s Congress, “Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo minfadian [Civil
Code of the People’s Republic of China],” 2020, cited in Rogier Creemers, “Chi-
na’s Emerging Data Protection Framework,” Journal of Cybersecurity 8, no. 1
(2022).
23 Shao, “The Surveillance Experience of Chinese University Students and the Value
of Privacy in the Surveillance Society.”
24 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958).
25 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
26 Ferdinand D. Schoeman, Privacy and Social Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
27 Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law
Review 4, no. 5 (1890).
28 Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1967).
29 Denise Anthony, Celeste Campos-Castillo, and Christine Horne, “Toward a Soci-
ology of Privacy,” Annual Review of Sociology 43 (2017).
30 Isabelle Berrebi-Hoffmann, Politiques de l’intime – des utopies sociales d’hier
aux mondes du travail d’aujourd’hui (Paris: La Découverte, 2009); Ariane Ollier-
Malaterre, Jerry Jacobs, and Nancy P. Rothbard, “Technology, Work and Family:
Digital Cultural Capital and Boundary Management,” Annual Review of Sociol-
ogy 45 (2019).
31 Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of
Social Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Helen Nissenbaum, “Pri-
vacy as Contextual Integrity,” Washington Law Review 79, no. 1 (2004).
32 Priscilla M. Regan, Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public
Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
33 Alice E. Marwick, and danah boyd, “Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negoti-
ate Context in Social Media,” New Media & Society 16, no. 7 (2014); Philip Fei
Wu, Jessica Vitak, and Michael T. Zimmer, “A Contextual Approach to Informa- tion Privacy Research,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and
Technology 71, no. 4 (2020).
34 danah boyd, “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree,
no. 13 (2007), www.danah.org/papers/KnowledgeTree.pdf.
35 Faiza Patel, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, Sophia DenUyl, and Raya Koreh Patel,
“Social Media Monitoring,” Brennan Center for Justice, 2019, www.brennan
center.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/Report_Social_Media_Monitoring.pdf.
36 Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behav-
ior,” in Psychology of Intergroup Relations (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1986).

Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:

and perhaps even ironed; but this arrangement would not produce
the vertical folds which we find in almost all the statues.
Kalkmann
[134]
calls the garment a “stilisirte himation,” and
suggests that the vertical lines are continued round the figure
because the artist had great difficulty in representing the transition
between the vertical folds which hang down from the arm and the
horizontal ones of the overfold. This explanation, however, does not
account for the frill-like edge which appears at the top of the
himation. Professor Baldwin Brown
[135]
has published some good
photographs of a model draped in this Ionian himation, but has not
given a very full or satisfactory explanation of how the effect was
produced. He says that the secret of the dress is that “the upper
edge of it, with all the folds, is tightly rolled over so that it is
shortened in the front, while at the same time the folds are kept in
their places.” He admits that the folds will only keep in place on a
“motionless wearer of imperturbable patience,” and therefore
supposes that the dress was evolved for use on the wooden xoana.
It seems unlikely that a special dress of such an elaborate nature
should have been evolved to drape these early wooden images, and
there is no reason to suppose that the series of Acropolis statues are
merely reproductions of such images. They appear much rather to
represent the grand Athenian ladies who dedicated themselves
symbolically to their patron goddess by setting up statues of
themselves in her honour. Since the statues were probably intended
to be set up permanently in a conspicuous place, it is natural that
the votaries would like to see themselves appearing in their best
clothes.
A careful study of the statues themselves and a consideration of
all the evidence bearing on the question leads to the conclusion that
the complete costume consists of two garments, a long under-dress,
which may be regarded as the usual indoor costume of the Athenian
ladies of the sixth century, and a mantle worn over it for out of
doors; occasionally a scarf or shawl is worn as well over the mantle,
perhaps for additional warmth, perhaps only for ornament. The

under-dress consists of the long linen Ionic chiton, a wide cylindrical
garment fastened by brooches or sewn down both arms so as to
form sleeves; a girdle is worn round the waist, and the superfluous
length of the material is drawn up over this girdle so as to form a
deep pouch; sometimes this pouch is worn all round the figure,
sometimes, as is apparently the case in a large seated figure of
Athena, the pouch is formed only in front. On some occasions
[136]
we find that the chiton, in addition to the pouch, has an overfold
from the neck resembling the ἀπόπτυγμα of the Doric peplos. This
overfold sometimes only covers the chest and sometimes hangs
down considerably lower. Such an overfold is very frequently found
on vases; in some cases its material may be of one piece with that
of the rest of the chiton, as it appears on one of the Nereids from
the so-called Nereid monument; but in those many cases where it
only appears between the shoulders and does not extend also along
the arms, it is quite possible that it may be a separate piece of stuff
sewn on to the chiton at the neck. It is probably the edge of such an
overfold that appears at the waist below the himation on the
Acropolis statues; no other satisfactory explanation of this detail of
the costume has at present been suggested. It is unlikely that it
represents the “kolpos,” because in all cases, with one possible
exception (No. 676; Lechat, fig. 29), a border is painted on it,
indicating that it is an edge and not a pouch. It has been suggested
that this overfold was sometimes made of a different kind of
material from the chiton on to which it was sewn, and that this
material was a silk or linen of a crinkled texture, indicated by the
wavy parallel lines which appear on the statues. The fact that this
treatment appears sometimes also on the skirt and on the upper
part of the mantle, diminishes the probability of this hypothesis, and
makes it appear more likely that this kind of technique was simply
used to represent very full folds in a fine material. Such a treatment
may have been suggested to the artist by familiarity with some
material of a crinkled texture, such as that used for sheets and
table-cloths in some Greek villages to-day.

With regard to the ornamental patterns which adorn the chiton,
we find borders at the feet and at the edge of the overfold, also
strips of ornamentation running round the neck and along the arms
and round the arm-holes, and almost invariably a broad band
running vertically down the front of the lower part of the chiton. In
addition to these strips and borders we also get stars or small floral
designs scattered over the whole garment. The bands which appear
at the edges are easy to understand; they were either woven in the
material of which they were made, or, more probably, embroidered
on to it afterwards; but in those cases where the overfold is worn
and a pattern appears at its edge and also along the neck and arms,
we must suppose that this latter was applied after the sleeves were
formed and the overfold attached. Possibly, also, the vertical band
on the lower part of the chiton represents a separate strip of
embroidery sewn on to the garment. The Greek women probably
occupied a large proportion of their time in embroidery; and since a
good piece of embroidery lasts for very many years, it is quite
possible that when the original garment was worn out, they may
have cut off the strip of still good work, and sewn it on to a new
dress. The only other explanation of the numerous patterns which
appear on the statues, is that the artist simply applied
ornamentation wherever it pleased his fancy to do so; this is less
satisfactory than to suppose that he was representing something
which he actually saw.
Fig. 33.
Turning to the himation or mantle worn over the chiton, the
simplest method of producing the effect seen in the Acropolis

statues was found by experiment to be by taking a piece of material
between 5 and 6 yards long and about 18 or 20 inches wide. This
was folded double, as in the diagram at the point a, so that the
points b and b′ met. Then at the points c and c′, at equal distances
from the corners, and cutting off at little less than one-third of the
wide length of the stuff, the two upper edges were fastened
together on the model’s right shoulder, a few pleats or gathers being
taken in the material on each side. A series of such fastenings was
made along the upper arm, as far as the points d and d′, which
reached to the model’s elbow; the rest of the stuff, as far as the
points b and b′, was allowed to hang down from the elbow. The part
of the material c to c′ passed under the left arm and was arranged
in a series of regular oblique folds running parallel to the box-pleat,
which formed itself naturally at the first fastening on the shoulder—
that is to say, at the points c and c′; these folds were held in place
by a band passing under the left breast, drawn rather tightly round
the figure and secured firmly on the right shoulder. In order to make
the lower edge of the cloak rise in the middle, as it does invariably in
the statues, it was found necessary to draw the folds up over the
band and let the upper edge fall over, forming a kind of frill. The frill,
however, hung down too low, and it was this fact that suggested
cutting the upper edge of the cloak out in a curve, or rather in two
curves, one at the back and one at the front, leaving the part under
the left arm longer than that in front and behind. When these curves
were cut out and the garment once more arranged in its pleats, the
little frill-like edge hung of itself over the band, just in the way in
which it appears in some of the statues. The band alone held the
folds fairly well in place; but in order to prevent the possibility of
their slipping, the Athenian ladies probably had them stitched on to
the band. It would be quite easy to slip the garment on and off over
the head without even unfastening it on the shoulder.
[137]

Fig. 34.—Drapery in the Style of the Archaic Statues in the Acropolis Museum, Athens.
[Face page 91.
The variations in detail which appear in the different statues can
easily be produced by arranging the folds in a slightly different
fashion. In some cases, as for example in No. 674 (Lechat, pl. 1),
the folds hang quite upright instead of obliquely, and the box-pleat
appears in the middle instead of hanging from the shoulder; this can
easily be produced by turning the folds first in one direction and

then in the opposite. The folds of the frill sometimes hang in the
opposite direction to those of the main part of the mantle; this is
simply a mistake on the part of the artist. Occasionally the frill does
not appear at all, for example in No. 686 (Lechat, fig. 37), but the
cloak hangs straight down from the broad band. In this instance we
must suppose that the overhanging mass of material has been cut
away entirely before the folds were attached to the band.
Sometimes the two ends were sewn together along the lines be
and b′e′, and in this case the last fastening, indicated by the letters
d and d′, approached nearer to the points b and b′, so as to leave
an opening only sufficient for the arm to pass through.
The detail of the cloak which presents most variety is the little
frill-like edge which falls over the band. Sometimes it appears to be
a natural continuation of the vertical folds which hang down below
it, and it falls over the band so as almost to hide it; sometimes it is
shorter, and reveals the band and forms a sort of leaf-like pattern
above it; in other cases it disappears entirely. Its most realistic
representation is in one of the Victories in the Acropolis Museum,
where the corners c and c′, formed by cutting the curves, are
actually indicated on the shoulder, and the frill lies in an irregular
zigzag, almost exactly as it was found to fall in practice.
In two cases in the Acropolis Museum at Athens, and in a statue
at Delphi, the band does not pass under the arm, but from shoulder
to shoulder, and the cloak covers both arms symmetrically, being
fastened down both alike with a series of brooches. In these cases
the box-pleat falls in the middle, and the curve must necessarily
have been considerably smaller, since the upper edge lies much
higher up towards the neck. When the cloak was worn in this way, it
was probably sewn up down both sides, and the curves for the neck,
back and front, were naturally equidistant from the two side-seams.
The openings for the arms would come at the ends of the top edge,
as in the case of the Ionic chiton.

Fig. 35.—Vase-painting—British Museum.
[Face page 93.
The style of dress represented by this set of monuments is
certainly the most luxurious which we find in Greek art at any
period. Now the date of the Acropolis maidens can be fixed at some
period certainly not later than the last quarter of the sixth century.
Solon’s sumptuary law regulating women’s dress must have been
enacted during the first years of the sixth century, so that we may

conclude that these dainty ladies with their chitons, cloaks, and
scarfs represent the height of luxury in dress which was possible
after the passing of that law: their self-satisfied smile seems to be
inviting approval of the degree of elegance to which their ingenuity
could attain, even though a stern law-giver had limited the number
of their garments to three.
This style of dress seems to have passed out of fashion at the
end of the sixth century, or in the early years of the fifth, for we find
it only in the early works of sculpture already mentioned. An attempt
to render it is frequently made by the artists of the early red-figured
vases—sometimes with some success; but more often the attempt
results in a confusion between this somewhat elaborate style of
cloak and the simpler development which it took later. Fig. 35 shows
a fairly successful attempt to represent the dress. Here we have the
band passing round the right shoulder and the vertical folds falling
from it, but the frill and the fastening down the right arm are
omitted. Possibly they taxed the artist’s skill too greatly; possibly the
style had already passed out of fashion in real life. But he would be
moderately familiar with the maidens on the Acropolis, although
perhaps not sufficiently so to be able to reproduce their costume in
detail. Working daily in his little shop down below in the Cerameicus,
perhaps he did not very frequently mount the citadel, where he
might study the art treasures that adorned it. Possibly even the vase
is not earlier than 480 B.C., and the picture is but a reminiscence of
the statues that the artist had seen on the Acropolis previous to their
burial at the coming of the Persians. Very often on the vases we find
the vertical folds represented falling from beneath a series of
horizontal folds obviously formed by turning over the top of the
cloak before fastening it on the shoulder. Here the band and
fastening down the arm are omitted.
[138]
The place of the frill is
taken by an overfold of the cloak before it is put on, and it is
fastened by a single brooch on the shoulder; the material is allowed
to hang in natural folds, and the necessity of cutting a curve in the
upper edge is obviated by the fact that no band is worn, and the
stuff is not arranged in artificial vertical folds. This style of cloak

appears already on the figure of Apollo, on the relief from Thasos in
the Louvre; it is seen most clearly in the Artemis of Gabii.
[139]
It was
probably developed from the earlier and more elaborate form of
cloak by gradual stages, first by omitting the artificial folds and the
band which held them in place, and then by omitting the numerous
fastenings on the arm. This would necessitate an alteration in the
shape of the cloak; it would naturally become more square.
Kalkmann, in the article already referred to, fig. 17, represents an
intermediate stage in this development, where a large cloak is worn
without band or frill, and is fastened by a series of several brooches
down one arm. Were it not for this representation of the transition
stage, we might be inclined to class the cloak of the Artemis of Gabii
as a development of the Doric peplos, which it resembles in having
an overfold and being fastened by a single large brooch on the
shoulder; and indeed these two elements are probably due to the
influence of the Doric dress, and we should therefore, perhaps, more
rightly call the final form of the cloak a blending of the two styles
rather than a development of either the one or the other.

Fig. 36.—Vase-painting—Ionic Dress.
[Face page 94.

Photo by Mansell & Co.]
Fig. 37.—The Artemis of Gabii—Louvre.
[Face page 95.
As early as the beginning of the fifth century we find the two
styles becoming confused and mingled together. The Doric peplos is
worn as an over-dress over the Ionic chiton, even by one of the
“Maidens” of the Acropolis, and later on the commonest form of
outdoor dress for women was the Ionic chiton with the Doric

himation over it. This combination appears in the so-called Fates of
the Parthenon pediment. Frequently we find this blending of the two
styles in a single garment; we find also on vases the overgirt Doric
peplos with sleeves formed by a number of brooches;
[140]
and again,
with cross-bands, which belong properly to the Ionic chiton.
[141]
Some authorities, pinning their faith entirely to Herodotus, consider
that the brooch is an element which belongs strictly only to the Doric
dress; they therefore regard the chiton with pinned sleeves as a
mixture of the two. An over-garment not very simple in form, which
can be regarded as neither Doric nor Ionic, but a mixture of both, is
illustrated by Fig. 38. Kalkmann regards it as a number of overfolds
or flounces sewn separately on to the chiton. It seems more
reasonable, however, to regard the part of the dress which appears
on the arms and at the feet, and which is made of a plain material,
as the chiton, and the rest which is ornamented with a pattern, as a
separate over-garment. This garment has three edges, at the waist,
hips, and ankles, so that it is obviously not merely an ordinary
rectangular himation, nor a simple Doric peplos with overfold. It
seems simplest to explain it as a Doric peplos with deep overfold,
ungirt, having a short false overfold to the waist sewn on over the
real one at the neck. Such over-garments never occur in sculpture
and only rarely on the vases, and may possibly be an error or
invention on the part of the vase-painter; if commonly worn, they
would probably be more frequently represented in art.

Fig. 38.—Vase-painting—Dress with two Overfolds.
[Face page 96.

VI
MATERIALS AND ORNAMENTATION
The fabrics in use for Greek dresses presented considerable variety.
The commonest materials were naturally woollen, but linen and silk
were used for more luxurious garments, and a kind of leather jerkin
known as διφθέρα
[142]
was sometimes worn by peasants.
That the woollen materials used themselves varied considerably
in texture, is proved by some fragments actually found in a tomb at
Kertch in the Crimea, and published in the Comptes rendus in 1878.
These date for the most part from the fourth century B.C., but one
at least probably goes back to the fifth century. They are in most
cases rather loosely woven, so that the separate threads are clearly
visible, and a bright object could be seen through the material. The
oldest piece is composed of such fine threads that it is almost
transparent; other pieces have a texture not unlike that of woollen
crêpe. A somewhat coarser piece, the threads of which are very
strong, has a portion of a seam remaining, which is oversewn with
strong woollen thread. In addition to very finely woven woollen
materials, the more luxurious of the Greeks wore also many varieties
of linen, and in some cases even silk. Pollux tells us that the long
linen chiton was worn by the Athenians and Ionians, and many
references are to be found in ancient literature to different kinds of
linen, coming from places usually in Asia or the more easterly of the

Ægean islands. Of these the most commonly mentioned are
ἀμόργινα, garments made of linen from the flax of Amorgos, and
βύσσινα, made of βύσσος, a yellowish kind of flax, coming especially
from India and Egypt. We learn from Aristophanes
[143]
that the
χιτώνιον ἀμόργινον was transparent, so that we may conclude that
the linen from which it was made was very fine indeed; perhaps it
resembled a very fine cambric. That βύσσος was a linen of some
kind, we are told by Pausanias,
[144]
and Pollux gives us the
information that it came from India. That it was known in Egypt also,
is testified by Herodotus,
[145]
who tells us of its use for mummy-
cloths. It was probably rather a mark of luxury when worn by the
Greeks, for Simætha
[146]
tells us that she wore a χιτών of it when
going out on a festive occasion.
Of materials which come under the heading of silk, three kinds
were known to the ancients. We read in Latin authors of vestes coæ,
bombycinæ, and sericæ, and these were also known to the Greeks.
Aristotle
[147]
is the first of the ancient writers who tells us anything
of the production of silk. After describing the various changes
undergone by the worm before becoming a moth, he gives us the
following information:—
Ἐκ δὲ τούτου τοῦ ζῴου καὶ τὰ βουβύκια ἀναλύουσι τῶν
γυναικῶν τινές ἀναπηνιζόμεναι, κἄπειτα ὑφαίνουσιν· πρώτη δὲ
λέγεται ὑφῆναι ἐν Κῷ Παμφίλη Πλάτεω θυγάτηρ.
“Some women undo the cocoons of this creature, winding off the
silk, and then weave it; and Pamphile, daughter of Plateus, is said to
have been the first to weave it in Cos.” This implies that the
manufacture of silk was carried on in Cos, but no information is
given as to whether the worm was reared in that island or whether
the raw silk was imported. Pliny
[148]
tells us more on the subject; he
seems to distinguish the three kinds of silk mentioned above. Of
these three, only “sericum” is, strictly speaking, silk—that is to say, a
material made by unwinding the cocoon of the silkworm reared on
the mulberry tree. This worm is first mentioned by Pausanias.
[149]
It

was the Chinese who discovered this method of procuring the silk,
and it was apparently unknown to the Greeks and Romans. The
“coa” and “bombycina” were procured by piercing and carding the
cocoon instead of unwinding them entire; the result was a substance
coarser and less brilliant than silk. Pliny draws a distinction between
“coa” and “bombycina,” telling us that the latter was a product of
Assyria and came from the ordinary mulberry worm, whereas the
worm from which coan silk was procured was reared on other trees,
notably the oak, ash, and cypress.
[150]
Coæ vestes are frequently mentioned by the Latin poets, chiefly
Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius, and from them we learn that they
were chiefly worn by Hetairæ and were of a transparent texture;
[151]
sometimes they were purple and had gold threads interwoven or
embroidered.
[152]
One piece of silk was found amongst other
materials at Kertch. In colour it is a bronze-gold, and is woven in a
lozenge pattern.
If Greek dress lacked variety of cut and material, the deficiency
was to some extent made up by considerable gaiety of colour and
ornamentation. Probably none but slaves and artisans would wear
garments of one colour without pattern or ornamentation of any
kind, and even they would sometimes have their dresses adorned
with a simple border, such as a broad stripe. From the numerous
references scattered up and down through extant literature, it
appears that the favourite colours were purple, red, and yellow.
Pollux
[153]
gives us a list of the colours most commonly used. This
list includes green (βατραχίς) and gray (κίλλιον, ὀνάγρινον), in
addition to those mentioned above, but strangely enough no
mention is made of blue. The word κυάνεος, “dark blue,” is seldom if
ever applied to garments, yet it is scarcely likely that the colour was
unknown to the Greeks. Possibly some shades described as
πορφύρεος approached a violet, or blue, as distinguished from
ἁλοῦργος, “true purple.” For red we find the word φοινίκεος, “dark
red,” used especially of the military cloak of the Lacedæmonians,
[154]
and κοκκοβαφής, “scarlet”; for yellow κροκωτός and θάψινος.

Βατραχίς, “frog-coloured,” is the word applied to a green garment,
and this is probably the colour described as ὀμφάνικος, “like unripe
grapes.” Pollux
[155]
tells us that for mourning the Greeks wore φαιὸν
καὶ μέλαν ἀλλήλοις ἔγγυς, “gray and black, very like each other.”
From this we learn that φαιός was a very dark colour, probably gray
or dun.
The ornamentation applied to dress by the Greeks was very
varied in character; it is comparatively rare to find on Greek vases a
dress that is entirely free from decorations, and the patterns
represented are very numerous. Sometimes the ornament consists
of a simple border, often of a pattern distributed all over the dress,
and these designs are frequently of a very elaborate character,
including animal and even human forms. In sculpture, too, this
feature was not neglected; the maidens of the Acropolis at Athens all
have some pattern on their draperies added in colour, and one of
them has no less than seven different designs distributed over her
costume. We know that the himation of the Olympian Zeus by
Pheidias was richly decorated, and the fragment from Damophon’s
great group at Lycosura will serve as a later example of sculptured
drapery highly ornamented with patterns in relief. This has not only
geometric and floral designs as borders, but the whole surface is
covered with fantastic dancing figures of human and hybrid forms.
References in literature are not very frequent; the most
noteworthy occurs in the Iliad,
[156]
where Helen is described as
working at a great loom:
ἣ δὲ μέγαν ἱστὸν ὕφαινεν
δίπλακα πορφυρέην, πολέας δ᾽ ἐνέπασσεν ἀέθλους
Τρώων θ᾽ ἱπποδάμων καὶ Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων.
“She was weaving a great purple web of double fold, and over it she
spread many battles of horse-taming Trojans and bronze-clad
Achæans.”

The epithet ποικίλος, applied to dress, undoubtedly means “richly
decorated,” and the ἀνθινά, “flowered garments,” frequently
mentioned in inscriptions, presumably refers to garments
ornamented with floral designs. In connection with the passage in
Homer, the question has been raised as to whether these complex
designs were woven into the material or embroidered afterwards. It
seems hardly likely that they were woven in, unless the work were a
heavy tapestry, such as would hardly be suitable for a costume;
moreover, the word ἐμπάσσω means “to sprinkle on,” and is more
easily applicable to the distribution of a design over a piece of
material already woven than to the formation of a pattern in the
course of the weaving. The words μέγαν, ἱστὸν, and ὔφαινεν would
still be applicable, because when the garment was at this stage, it
would still be regarded as incomplete, and the designs, however
applied, would probably be at least sketched out while it was still on
the loom.

Fig. 39.—Fragments of a Sarcophagus Cover from Kertch.
[Face page 103.
Among the fragments of materials found at Kertch were some
which were embroidered, others which had simple geometrical
designs woven into the borders; in addition to these there were
some considerable fragments of a large sarcophagus cover, the
ornamentation of which is strongly reminiscent of Greek vase-
painting of the fourth century. The ground is black and is covered

with designs in red and light terra-cotta; the ornamentation is
divided into bands, and consists of battle scenes with chariots, and
birds and beasts scattered about the field of the design; the bands
are separated by different patterns, many of which are frequently
met with on vases. These include the egg and dart pattern, ivy and
laurel wreaths, large palmettes, and many others.
[157]
Names are
inscribed against some of the figures, among others ΝΙΚΗ, ΑΘΗΝΑΙΗ
ΙΟΚΑΣΤΗ, (Ι)ΓΓΟΜΕΔΩΝ, etc.
These designs are not embroidered, nor are they produced in the
course of weaving the cloth; they are apparently drawn out by
means of some pigment applied after the material was woven.
Herodotus tells us
[158]
that the people of the Caucasus used to paint
animals on their clothes with some vegetable pigment which they
mixed with water. Some such procedure, then, must have been
practised by the Greeks of the fourth century, which is the date
assignable to the fragment in question, on the evidence of the
inscriptions.
The designs applied to Greek dresses presented abundant
variety, as is evidenced by extant monuments, especially by the
vases; they may be roughly classed as geometric, floral, and those
containing animal and human forms. Of the geometric designs some
are rectilinear, others curvilinear. The favourite rectilinear borders are
broad lines, parallel rows of zigzag lines, the mæander or key
pattern in very many forms varying from the simple running
mæander to a complicated double fret, broken at intervals by stars
or chequers. In addition to these borders we frequently find a
chequer pattern covering the whole surface of a garment. A kind of
net pattern, often seen on vases, was very probably used in dresses
also. Of the curvilinear designs the most common are the “guilloche”
or plait-band, the simple spiral, and the κυμάτιον or wave pattern.
On the black-figured vases a kind of scale pattern frequently occurs
covering a wide surface.
A very great variety of floral designs was used by the Greeks for
ornamentation of all kinds; they are very frequent as part of the

scheme of decoration of vases, especially of those of Ionic origin. A
favourite pattern is a simple laurel wreath like that depicted in Fig.
39; the ivy also forms the basis of more than design. Sometimes it
takes the form of a row of leaves on either side of a straight line;
more often the leaves alternate with tendrils and berries. By far the
commonest and the most beautiful of floral designs are those made
up of lotus buds and flowers and palmettes. Sometimes we find the
lotus alone forming the motive of the design, sometimes it alternates
with palmettes. A very graceful pattern is composed of oblique
palmettes turned in opposite directions and connected by spirals.
[159]
That these designs so commonly used for the decoration of pottery
were employed also in the textile arts is proved by some of the
fragments found at Kertch. Quite considerable remains were found
of a piece of woollen material elaborately embroidered with a large
floral design (Fig. 40), the main motive of which is a graceful
palmette, from the base of which spring spirals terminating in heart-
shaped leaves and flowers. The design is executed in gold and green
on a violet ground.
[160]

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

Living With Digital Surveillance In China Citizens Narratives On Technology Privacy And Governance 1st Edition Ariane Olliermalaterre

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

Living With Digital Surveillance In China Citizens Narratives On Technology Privacy And Governance 1st Edition Ariane Olliermalaterre

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 6

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 32

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 36

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 51

Slide 52

Slide 53

Slide 54

Slide 55

Slide 56

Slide 57

Slide 58

Slide 59

Slide 60

Slide 61

Slide 62

Slide 63

Slide 64

Slide 65

Slide 66

Slide 67

Slide 68

Slide 69

Slide 70

Slide 71

Slide 72

Slide 73

Slide 74

Slide 75

Slide 76

Slide 77

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows