THE INTELLIGENTISATION OF SOCIAL GOVERNANCE

"…the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary."

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Introduction

High-tech surveillance via incorporated technologies and legislation has become common in an increasing number of nation-states, both in democratic and authoritarian regimes. This trend has further intensified since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with states such as China having justified invasive and sophisticated forms of AI-powered surveillance for the sake of public health management. As Katherine Mason has observed, China's epidemic management mechanism exhibits a 'permanent and intractable bifurcation of service and governance' that not only leads to various ethical challenges but also closes the opportunities for the outside world to scrutinise the dire realities happening within the boundaries of the party-state.

Hence, what we see is a state that comes with the intention of 'social governance' but then transmutes itself into a surveillance state where the promises of governance are framed within coercive procedures of social control. The 'prevention and control' (fangkong) doctrine that has been officially followed for handling previous public health crises in China since the SARS epidemic of 2003, remains instrumental for tackling the ongoing 'people’s war’ against COVID-19.   The ‘prevention and control’ system thus in place is also increasingly being utilised for resolving political risks, tightening public security, and maintaining social stability.

Amidst more informatised and intelligent forms of surveillance and control, especially when these technologies are widely exported, the geopolitical implications are worrisome. With these concerns, this issue brief attempts to study and analyse the consequences of China’s ‘intelligentised social governance’. The brief is divided into two sections - the first section outlines the development of China’s surveillance mechanisms over the years, and the second section identifies certain geopolitical implications of China’s digital authoritarianism and surveillance practices.

The Rise of the Surveillance State

While various social management and surveillance mechanisms have been carried out in China for many years, the term ‘intelligentisation of social governance’ finds its genesis in the Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (AIDP). In July 2017, for building China’s first-mover advantage in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the State Council announced the AIDP. Alongside various targets, it envisaged the construction of a ‘safe and convenient intelligent society’ and modernised ‘social governance’ (shehui zhili) via the use of AI-enabled high-quality services in areas of governance such as administrative management, judicial management, urban management, and so on. The document observes the need for an intelligent infrastructure powered by collaborative AI, big data and high-performance computing to significantly elevate capabilities to effectively ‘construct governance’ for maintaining societal stability. Whilst party control over the public and public information for constructing governance has been practised for a long time throughout the communist party regime, particular leadership changes have effectuated certain distinct forms of surveillance and control in practice. Despite the promise of governance aimed at guidance rather than control by providing more responsibilities to the civil societies and market forces, Hoffman and Mattis note that ‘social governance’ that is being practised in the Xi Jinping era under the aegis of the State Security Committee has more centralising tendencies than the ‘social management’ (shehui guanli) that was followed in the Hu Jintao era. The shift towards social governance to ‘strengthen leadership by the Party committee’ and a ‘leading role of the government’ is significant to observe for the rise of the surveillance state, especially when it is increasingly equipping itself with high-tech tools to govern. Understanding the evolution of surveillance policy is essential to gauge the increasing presence of the Chinese surveillance state in people’s socio-political lives today.

In 1996, the State Council issued Order No. 95 for the “Management of Computer Information Networks hooked up with International Networks” that paved the initial path towards establishing the state’s managerial power over its internet users through “unified planning, unified standards, and separation of management at different levels”. In 2000, after the Golden Shield Project (jindun gongcheng) was envisaged, China’s internet, protected by the Great Firewall, was practically made into an intranet within its territory. The state tracked and censored controversial political opinions and online dissidents through this. It strengthened the state’s internet censorship and allowed private players to provide data-driven solutions for the surveillance project.

Thus, the Golden Shield Project was seen as a significant change from a generalised control of online content towards individualised user surveillance and automated information sharing. It brought forth integrated information platforms (zonghe xinxi pingtai) and a four-tiered security network (gongan wang) that connected the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) with its local governance bureaus, thereby creating a unified command over police work. It was only in 2013, after the establishment of the Cyberspace Administration Commission, the complete and centralised control of the state’s internet entirely materialised. The Great Firewall now uses robust AI monitoring and filtering mechanisms to control social movements and people’s mobilisation.

Another tool of the state’s social management is the grassroots-level monitoring of the grid management system (wanggehua guanli) that became operational in some cities as early as 2004. Through a ‘system of contracted responsibility’ (chengbao zeren zhi), cities were divided into basic ‘management units of digital city’, and information of residents and migrant workers was collected for policing at the established grid levels. With the goal of stability maintenance, the grid management system employs invasive approaches to gather citizen information. With more technologies assisting the data gathering and grid monitoring processes, the party-state has established encompassing top-down management of public security. Besides grid management, to encourage innovation in the ‘dynamic management of social conflicts’ and public opinion influence, the State Council issued guiding opinions on social management innovation’ in 2011. Through these opinions, the party fostered and invested in intermediary civil society organisations that promised to engage in the vision of stability maintenance.

Intending to make China a “strong internet power”, the 12^th Five Year Plan as well as the “Internet Plus” strategy of 2011, have led to increasing investments in the emerging fields of big data and Internet of Things (IoT). Consequently, such investments have enabled the state to create big data algorithms for the project of social surveillance, yet again. One such major development is the Social Credit System (shehui xinyong) which was first proposed in 2014. Based on big-data algorithms, this system evaluates a Chinese citizen's “social trustworthiness”. It is expected to cover all of the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens by 2022. The social credit system comes not only as a tool to evaluate the financial trustworthiness of the citizens but it also enables the technology- driven implementation of “responsibility mechanisms” and a simultaneous social control.

The involvement of private companies in the implementation of this project has further strengthened the technological infrastructures on which state surveillance is carried out. Guidelines and warnings regarding the “trustworthiness” of citizens have been released since the rollout of the social credit system. Various documents and regulations released by the CPC (Communist Party of China)’s Central Committee such as the ‘Rongcheng Municipal Measures on Personal Credit Rewards and Punishments’(For Translation, see - https://www.chinalwtranslate.com/en/rongcheng-personal-credit-reward-and-punishment-measures/), provincial regulations such as the ‘Guangdong Provincial Social Credit Regulations’(For Translation, see - https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/guandong-provincial-social-credit/), and warning documents such as ‘Warning and Punishment Mechanisms for Trust-Breakers’, and more, imply the state’s intentions of not only monitoring but also modifying the behavioural preferences and the conduct of its citizens. With AI-driven technologies and innovative prevention and control systems, the mechanisms of social governance are ubiquitously engrained into the daily lives of Chinese citizens. Hence, this is a notable shift from the yesteryears of ‘management’ and maintenance of social stability.

The Chinese tech-enabled surveillance reached its heights upon the implementation of the ‘Sharp Eyes’ (xueliang) project in 2015. This project aimed at achieving complete coverage and “full control” of all of China’s public areas by 2020. As a measure, the Ministry of Public Security called for a “fully networked and fully controllable” national video surveillance network. The ministry also instructed the nationwide ‘Police Cloud’ project envisaging integrated gathering of four types of data: public security professional data, government department management data, public service agency business data, and Internet data.

The data thus gathered from citizens are as sensitively personal as their medical records, transaction histories with e-commerce companies, travel histories, etc. It is estimated that by the end of 2021, the total number of surveillance cameras will grow beyond 400 million – amounting to approximately one camera for every three citizens. This shows that the extent of surveillance is on the rise in China. Furthermore, to enable joint work of such projects and to legitimise the proliferation of private technologies for the state’s use, the National Intelligence Law of 2017 purported to “unify and centralise” intelligence systems. Through this legislation, private companies are mandated for assisting and cooperating with the state’s intelligence network. In 2018, The white paper on AI Security released by the Chinese Academy for Information Technology recommended public opinion monitoring and ‘automating’ social governance, acknowledging the substantial role of private companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu in the implementation of the intelligentisation of social governance.

Above all, some provinces' surveillance intentions and procedures are more alarming than others, Xinjiang being the palpable reality. While predictive policing systems across the globe unduly harm ethnic minorities, and that racial bias is becoming disturbingly common, the practice of bio- metric surveillance in Xinjiang is a peculiar case. It comes with the blatantly pretentious promise of “scientific decision-making” towards public healthcare, poverty alleviation, and indeed, the maintenance of social stability. The ‘Physicals for All’ programme that was launched in 2017 for the sake of “national health examination work” in Xinjiang, forcibly collected blood samples and biometric details of the region’s residents to create a DNA databank. Being the first state to employ AI for racial profiling, China’s policies towards the Uyghur Muslims are undoubtedly driven by ‘algorithms of repression’. Mass surveillance in Xinjiang is conducted through the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) that deploys “wifi sniffers”, machine sensors, and other sophisticated facial recognition technologies to monitor, store, and manage residents’ activities. All the extracted data is localised within the domestic territory. For the Chinese state, the IJOP is a technological solution devised to “inquire, investigate and thoroughly sort” the ideological and familial issues of the population. To target the Muslim minorities, mosques are labelled as “high-risk” areas and are monitored through real-time video. For striking hard against terrorism and Islamic extremism, the state utilises high-tech surveillance to vigil day-to-day activities, and profiles certain religious and cultural practices as “pre-crimes”. Ironically, at a time when such systems are systematically well-deployed and functioning, China has signed the United Nations’ pledge on banning AI for social scoring systems (For further details, read UNESCO’s draft text of the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence - https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379920.page=14).

Concerns and Implications

Despite the sanguine possibilities portrayed by the party-state in the name of ‘surveilling and serving’, it is foreseeable that AI technologies will make authoritarianism more sustainable, at the least in the medium term. Domestically, we see that public opinion is controlled and manipulated through automated internet censorship. Additionally, AI-powered technological ownership will enable Chairman Xi Jinping to assert more power and control over the party elites. In the international context, there are several consequences.

Firstly, the normalisation of mass surveillance systems and the state-enforced silences in the name of ‘social governance’ are catastrophic to the imaginaries of individual civil liberties. The human rights issue is the primary problem, evidently seen in the covert and coercive monitoring mechanisms in the Xinjiang and Tibet Autonomous Regions. Severe incursions on reproductive rights of ethnic minorities (such as the campaigns against ‘illegal births’), their right to language and religion, and more importantly, their right to live together as a household are all devastatingly controlled by tech-intensive methods of digital enclosures. Given that China spends substantially more on internal security in its defence budget, further investments and deployment of intrusive technologies for effective surveillance and ethnic sorting are gravely concerning. Furthermore, the differences in how each state employs surveillance technologies and associated human rights issues will further widen the ideological gap between the western liberal international order and the nationalistic ambitions of the Chinese communist party.

Secondly, with the state embracing AI technologies with increasing speed and scale, the imminent indigenous innovation and technological self-sufficiency make the exercise of an aggressive foreign policy more expedient. In general, the ambitions of fragile and autocratic regimes to deploy mass surveillance are often hindered by the low level of domestic technological capabilities, thereby urging these regimes to get into international collaborations. China’s Belt Road Initiative (and a Digital Silk Road) becomes crucial here. With the entry of state-backed Chinese companies into the European and African markets, the export of security technologies is imminent. As of 2018, thirty-six BRI countries have incorporated significant AI surveillance technologies for their domestic governance. In export technologies – mainly for smart city platforms, facial recognition systems, and smart policing - China is now the leading supplier of AI surveillance technology, according to the AI Global Surveillance Index. The increasing export of these technologies can also lead to the adoption of CPC’s practices for social and political control across states. For instance, avowing effective public diplomacy, China trains Latin American and African journalists to utilise emerging technologies for their professions. These exports and training programmes influence include a vast number of actors that tend to form a ‘security-industrial complex’ where private companies along with the MPS are progressively becoming responsible for the export of surveillance goods.

In sum, we see that China’s grand strategy of ‘social stability and enduring peace’ is sought through an authoritarian flavour of digital entrenchment. China’s informatisation and surveillance backbone is the big data-driven large-scale deployment of machine learning algorithms, AI, facial recognition technologies, and other sophisticated technologies backed by an intelligent infrastructure. As discussed, AI technologies may appear to remedy regime’s insecurity and as an efficient tool for social governance. This being said, nation-states should be cautious with their technological collaborations with China. The diffusion of AI-based surveillance power into society will not only distort democratic ideals but will also escalate geopolitical risks at an unprecedented and uncontrollable scale.