Book report: The Sentinel State
The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, by Minxin Pei
I don’t recommend reading this to most people. It’s a hard slog that is primarily of interest to historian of bureaucratic organizations. But it has some interesting insights into why the Chinese surveillance state works.
The book begins with a long history of the surveillance and police bureaucracies in China. It covers from the 1940s to the present. It is quite tedious and not important to me. A bureaucratic historian might be interested. But within this history there is some information on staffing levels. Many of the staffing numbers had to be guesswork or extrapolation from very limited public sources. There is very little official staffing or budget information available.
It indicates that the Chinese structure is extremely efficient and well structured. Some comparative numbers:
East German Stasi – 1+ FTE per 200 population
US Federal LE agencies – 1 FTE per 1000 population
China National agencies – 1 FTE per 10,000 population
The Chinese do not have separate agencies for “criminal” and “political” activities, so the proper comparison with the US is to the combined employment of all the Federal civilian law enforcement agencies. The Chinese categorize their targets but the surveillance agencies deal with all categories. A violent criminal and a political activist will be labeled and put into different categories, and then the same agency deals with both.
The Chinese structure is divided along functional lines. Rather than attempt precise translations of organization names I found it useful to call the agencies: spying, surveillance, and monitoring.
Spying (mostly domestic) – This involves in person activities like physical searches, wiretapping, secret or public interrogation, etc. For every target of spying there is an identified team in a spying agency that is tracking that target.
Surveillance – This is less directly intrusive and more covert. For each target there is an identified team in a surveillance agency that is tracking all manner of information about the target. This will include analyzing of all electronic and personal activity by the target. Analysis will include reports from party committees, business activities, neighbors, etc. The surveillance agency maintains a continuous evaluation of each target.
Monitoring – This is not done by the spying and surveillance agencies. It is done by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). They have created a massive universal database of all electronic activity by all persons. This includes telephone, texts, web, smartphone use, location, face recognition, etc. Visible physical activity is also captured by reports from CCP local committees (neighborhood, business, etc.) covering what a person has said and done. The monitoring database is available and used by the spying and surveillance agencies. The spy and surveillance agencies do not maintain or update the database. They query it and make use of it to maintain their dossiers on targets.
This monitoring is analogous to the private data gathering in the US, but much more expansive and universal. In the US a commercial app might track what a person does on their smartphone. In China, a mandatory government app tracks everything that every person does on their smartphone. The physical monitoring is also more universal. Any significant business includes CCP participation in the business. The activities, speech, attitudes, etc. of all employees and customers is under continuous supervision by the CCP members and they report anything of interest into the monitoring database. Businesses report all their customer activities. For example, a taxi will report who used the taxi, when, from where and to where. Public activities like walking from place to place will be recorded by face recognition and phone tracking.
This structure explains how the spying and surveillance staff can be so much smaller in proportion than the Stasi or US Federal LEO. The huge data gathering effort is a separate function performed by the CCP as part of it’s general social and political control. In the US, all the data gathering is up to the LEO organizations and it involves a lot more paperwork and restrictions like warrants.
The IT organizations within spying and surveillance can concentrate on search and filtering capabilities. The CCP worries about creating and updating the big database. When a person becomes a target, the spy and surveillance agencies can quickly create a historical dossier. From then on, they can filter all the incoming updates to find information to update the target’s dossier.
The book summarizes the monitoring technologies used by the CCP. But this is not the focus of the book. There are other books and articles that cover that. It is clear that the goal is to be comprehensive even at the cost of lower accuracy or detail.
This book shows that an efficient organization can be created to utilize that huge database and turn it into actionable information about identified targets. Separating by function has delivered a lot of cost savings. If you are interested in the technologies involved, look elsewhere. This is about organizations and organizational behavior.