Big Data Surveillance and China’s Political History of Capture

• In Event: A New/Old Technology for Governance? Questioning Big Data Surveillance - I: Big Data State & Private Enterprise

Abstract

The Chinese government plans to establish a national social credit system by 2020. Driven by big data, the project aims to assign each citizen a “trustworthiness rating.” While the Chinese government insists that the system will foster certainty and transparency in a highly unpredictable socio-economic landscape, global news media have discussed the policy predominantly as a form of Orwellian state surveillance. However, what such accounts fail to consider is how, apart from surveillance, this project develops another mode of control. This paper draws on ethnographic research and media analysis to argue that the social credit system continues a project of capture that has driven Chinese politics for decades. While emphasis has shifted from the quality of the population in the 1980s to personal quality in the 1990s, Chinese governance continuously employed value coding as a form of control. By limiting the possible ways of being a “person of quality,” as has been argued, this coercive system of socio-moral regulation constitutes an apparatus of capture. The social credit system, this paper argues, extends this mode of control to digital capture, as it encodes highly complex issues of trust, insecurity, and personal value into a unified “trustworthiness” rating system. This discussion contributes to debates about big data in STS by exploring the novelty of big data surveillance as well as its development and incorporation of existing technologies of governance. What can this Chinese instance of big data governance tell us about the relationship between big data surveillance and the techno-politics of capture?

Author

• Samuel Lengen, University of Virginia