Making Digital Policing Work: Building Safe Cities between China and Russia

• In Event: Digital Authoritarianism in the Communist and Post-Communist World

Abstract

Recent advances in information technology provide governments with the possibility of relying on digital policing to enhance the capacity of coercive agencies to track the movements and activities of societal actors in densely populated cities. However, deploying surveillance technology in urban governance is not straightforward given the complexity of the industrial chain in the security equipment sector. How do states coordinate among competing bureaucracies and between state and business actors to achieve their goals? To address this political coordination dilemma, this paper compares the development of digital policing in contemporary Russia and China based on a most similar case research design. Both countries have transitioned from centrally-planned socialism to a mode of state capitalism that allows for market competition in most sectors of the economy. Both states also launched “Safe City” initiatives to build digital infrastructure at similar points in time. Analytically, the paper identifies infrastructural power and the extent of centralization in intergovernmental relations to explain how different institutional conditions affect the coordination capacity of political authorities in their application of digital technologies. In Russia’s competitive authoritarian regime, fiscal responsibility for building safe cities has oscillated between central and local governments, which has posed challenges for coordination. Furthermore, the dominance of state-owned enterprises in standard setting and oligopolies in the industrial chain has impeded the capacity of local governments to develop surveillance systems that fit local realities. By contrast, in China, the public security department has dominated the entire Safe City project from the beginning, under pressure from the center, local governments and public security agencies have assumed full responsibility for their construction; as such both horizontal and vertical layers of administration in China are committed to developing the institutions and means to achieve dynamic management of the industry chain for effective security governance.

Author

• Jingyang HUANG, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology