When The Berlin Wall Fell, And The Communist Regimes In Eastern Europe Collapsed Like Dominoes, It Seemed That History Was Moving In One Direction. There Was An Almost Collective Certainty In Western Political Science Circles That Authoritarian Regimes Relying On Naked Repression And Ideological Control Would Not Be Able To Endure For Long In The Face Of Globalization And Informational Openness And The Growth Of The Middle Class. And China Was The Biggest Test Of This Certainty. In 1989, Tiananmen Square Shook, And Students And Workers Came Out Demanding Reform, And The Leadership Of The Chinese Communist Party Faced A Truly Existential Moment. But The Party Did Not Fall. On The Contrary, It Emerged From The Crisis More Determined To Survive, And Smarter In Building The Tools For Its Survival. And After More Than Three Decades, China Does Not Appear As A State On The Verge Of Collapse, But As A Superpower Whose Ability To Control A Society Of One Billion And Four Hundred Million People With Amazing Precision Is Increasing.
Here Comes The Book By The Chinese-American Scholar Pei Minxin Published By Harvard University Press In 2024 Under The Title “The Sentinel State: Surveillance And The Survival Of Dictatorship In China”. This Book Is An Attempt To Answer The Most Important Puzzle In Contemporary Comparative Politics: How Did The Chinese Communist Party Survive? And What Is The Real Price Of This Survival?
Pei Minxin Is Not A Passing Observer Of Chinese Affairs. He Is A Professor Of Political Science At Claremont McKenna College, And The Author Of The Books “China In Transition” And “China’s Crony Capitalism”, And He Has Been Known For His Quiet Critical Tendency That Does Not Get Carried Away By The Optimistic Discourse Of “China’s Rise”, Nor By The Inevitable Discourse Of “China’s Collapse”. In This Latest Work, Which Took Years Of Painstaking Research In Party Documents, And Local Financial Statistics, And Hundreds Of Interviews, Pei Presents A New Concept He Calls The “Sentinel State”. It Is A Concept That Goes Beyond The Stereotypical Image Of China As A Digital Surveillance State That Relies Only On Artificial Intelligence And Facial Recognition.
The Image Usually Painted By The Western Media Is A Purely Orwellian Image: Cameras On Every Corner, And Algorithms Tracking Every Click, And A Social Credit System That Classifies Citizens. This Image Is Not Wrong, But It Is, As Pei Argues, Incomplete And Dangerously Misleading. For The Real Innovation That Saved The Chinese Communist Party After 1989 Was Not Technological In The First Place, But Was Bureaucratic And Organizational And Human. The Party Built A Hybrid Surveillance Machine, Combining Advanced Technology With A Huge Army Of Low-Tech Humans: Neighborhood Security Men, And Volunteers Of Neighborhood Committees, And Grid Informants, And Stability Officers In Factories And Universities.
The Core Of The Book’s Thesis Lies In That The Communist Party Understood The Most Important Lesson From Tiananmen: That Violent Bloody Repression, Despite Its Effectiveness In The Short Term, Is Politically And Internationally Costly, And Not Sustainable. Therefore, It Moved From A Strategy Of “Reactive Repression” Which Waits For The Explosion And Then Crushes It With Tanks, To A Strategy Of “Preemptive Prevention” Which Monitors The Early Signs Of Anger And Strangles It In The Cradle. This Is The Sentinel State: A State That Does Not Sleep, Its Eyes Open In Every Alley, And Its Primary Function Is Not Governance Or Development, But Early Monitoring And Early Containment.
And To Understand How This State Works, Pei Takes Us On A Precise Anatomical Journey Of The Party’s Security Apparatus. And It Is An Apparatus Not Usually Seen In Superficial Analyses. He Explains How The Central Political And Legal Affairs Commission (CPLC), Which Was Just A Small Marginal Group In The Eighties, Turned After 1989 Into A Bureaucratic Empire Parallel To The Ministry Of Public Security, Supervising The Police And The Courts And The Public Prosecution And Even Prisons. This Commission, And Its Local Branches That Today Reach The Level Of The Town And The Village, Is The Mastermind Of The Sentinel State. It Is The One That Translates The Orders Of The Standing Committee Of The Politburo Into Daily Action Plans: Who Are The Dangerous Groups That Must Be Monitored This Month? And How Is A Potential Protester Neutralized Before He Reaches Beijing To File A Complaint?
What Distinguishes The Book Is Its Insistence On Numbers And Material Facts. Pei Does Not Content Himself With Theoretical Analysis, But Digs Into Budgets. He Reveals That The Budget Of “Internal Stability” That Funds This Machine Has Exceeded The Official National Defense Budget Since 2010, And Has Reached Astronomical Figures Estimated At Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars Annually. This Huge Spending Did Not Go Only To Buy Cameras, But To Employ Millions. In One Medium-Sized City, You May Find Tens Of Thousands Of “Grid Workers”, And Each One Is Responsible For Monitoring A Few Hundred Families, And Recording Their Movements, And Their Mood, And Their Complaints.
This Is The Paradox That The Book Places Before The Reader From Its First Pages: That The Most Advanced Surveillance System In The Twenty-First Century Still Relies Primarily On The Most Primitive Surveillance Tool: Man Monitoring Man. Technology Did Not Eliminate The Need For The Informant, But Made Him More Effective. For The Data Collected By The Camera Has No Value Without The Neighborhood Employee Who Knows That So-And-So Is Unemployed And Frequents The Mosque Or The Church Or Meets With Foreign Journalists.
In This Sense, The Book “The Sentinel State” Is A Book About A Radical Transformation In The Nature Of The Leninist State. For The Traditional Leninist State Relied On Mass Mobilization And Political Campaigns. As For The New Chinese State, It Relies On Silent Bureaucracy And Routine Prevention. The Party No Longer Wants To Mobilize Millions In The Squares To Chant Its Name, But It Only Wants To Know Where They Are, And What They Think, And How To Prevent Them From Gathering In The First Place.
This Long Introduction Is Necessary To Understand The Scale Of The Achievement Presented By Pei Minxin. For He Does Not Write About China As A Strange Or Exceptional Case, But Writes About A New Model For The Survival Of Authoritarianism In The Information Age. A Model That May Find Those Who Imitate It In Other Capitals. Therefore, Reading This Book Is A Necessity To Understand The Future Of The Relationship Between Technology And Power And Freedom Everywhere.
The Heart Of The Book Lies In Its Dissection Of The Bureaucratic Machine That Makes This State Possible. Here Pei Minxin Emerges As A Field Researcher Who Does Not Content Himself With Big Slogans, But Goes Down Into The Corridors Of The Party Organization To Reveal How A Marginal Committee Turned Into The Backbone Of The System Of Governance In China.
The Story Begins With The Political And Legal Affairs Commission, Or What Is Known For Short As CPLC At The Center, And PLCs In The Regions And Provinces. Before 1989, This Commission Was Just A Weak Coordinating Body, Barely Possessing Real Powers. But After The Shock Of Tiananmen, The Party Leadership Realized That Its Fragmented Security Apparatuses – The Police, State Security, The Judiciary, The Prosecution – Work Like Isolated Islands, Each Singing To Its Own Tune, And There Is No One Who Links Them With One Strategic Thread That Guarantees The Security Of The Regime. From Here Came The Decision To Inflate. The Central Commission Transformed From A Coordinator To A Leader, And From An Advisor To A Supervisor Who Has The Right To Appoint And Promote And Dismiss All Security And Judicial Officers In The Country. Its Head, Who Until Recently Was A Member Of The Standing Committee Of The Politburo, The Highest Governing Body In China, Became Practically The Second Man In The Police State, Followed By The Heads Of Local Commissions Who Are At The Same Time Members Of The Permanent Party Committees In Their Provinces.
What Is Amazing In Pei’s Description Is The Detail Of The Work Of These Commissions. In The Poor Province Of Guizhou, For Example, He Found That Its Local Commission Consists Of Fifteen Departments And Offices: A Department For Cadre, And A Department For Propaganda And Cyberspace Management, And Two Departments For Supervising Law Enforcement, And Four Departments For Comprehensive Management, And Two Departments For Maintaining Stability, And A Department For Information Supervision And Investigation, And A Department For Combating Crime, And A Department For Combating What The Party Calls “Evil Cults”, And A General Office And A Research Office. These Divisions Are Not Just Absurd Bureaucracy, But Are A Precise Map Of The Five Functions Of The Sentinel State: Managing And Auditing The Loyalty Of Workers In The Political-Legal Sector, And Traditional Law Enforcement, And System Security And Maintenance Of Stability, And Coordination Of Political-Legal Work, And Suppression Of Prohibited Religious Groups.
But The Story Does Not Stop At The Center. The Diabolical Genius Of The System, As Pei Describes It, Lies In Its Ability To Replicate Itself To The Level Of The Neighborhood And The Village. By The End Of Every February Of Each Year, The Party’s Annual Security Agenda Has Moved From Beijing To The Province, And From The Province To The City, And From The City To The Neighborhood. And There, In The Neighborhood Committee, Sits A Small But Dangerous Employee, Who Is The Stability Officer. This Employee Is Not A Policeman In Official Uniform, But He Has A List Of Names Of “Key Persons” Who Must Be Monitored: Veterans Of The People’s Liberation Army Who Demand Better Pensions, And Followers Of The Banned Falun Gong Movement, And “Complainants” Or Shang Fang Zhe Who Travel To The Capital To File Complaints Against Local Corruption, And Laid-Off Workers, And Even Neighbors Who Complain A Lot.
And To Understand How This Machine Works On The Ground, The Book Presents A Rare Document: A Record Of A Full Week Of Work Of The Futian Neighborhood Committee In The City Of Shenzhen, One Of The Most Modern Cities In China, During The Last Week Of December 2015. Nothing Exceptional In That Week, And That Is What Makes It Revealing. The Stability Maintenance Office In The Neighborhood Was Working With The Municipal Letters And Visits Office To Solve The Case Of Complainants Deceived By An Online Crowdfunding Platform, And At The Same Time It Was Coordinating How To Deal With A Group Of Veterans Who Are Planning An Activity That May Cause Disturbance, And Monitoring A Labor Dispute In Two Local Factories. At The Same Time, The Comprehensive Social Management Office Was Inspecting The Implementation Of Anti-Terrorism Measures, And Ordering A Campaign Against Trafficking In Wild Animals, And Preparing For A Propaganda Event About Traffic Safety. As For The Notorious 610 Office, Tasked With Hunting Falun Gong, It Was Helping The Head Of The State Security Branch In Shenzhen During His Research Visit, And Supervising Two Investigations Into “Sectarian” Activities, And Issuing Two Documents Proving That Certain Citizens Are Not Associated With “Evil Cults”, Which Are Documents They Need To Get A Job.
This Daily Picture Reveals The Essence Of The Sentinel State: It Is Not A State That Lives In A Permanent State Of Emergency, But A State Of Routine, A Boring Bureaucratic State, That Turns Repression Into A Daily Office Work. Surveillance Is Not An Exceptional Event, But It Is Part Of The Job Description. And Here Lies The Fundamental Difference Between China And Other Police Models Such As The Former East Germany. While The Stasi Relied On A Huge Central Apparatus Comprising Hundreds Of Thousands Of Official And Unofficial Agents, China Relies On A Distributed And Decentralized System. The Regular Police In China Is Relatively Small Compared To The Population, About Two Million Policemen Only, That Is, China, By International Standards, Is A State Suffering From A Shortage In The Number Of Policemen. But The Party Compensated For This Shortage With An Army Of Auxiliary Police And People’s Militia And Volunteers Whose Number May Exceed The Number Of The Regular Police Itself.
The Operational Heart Of This Distributed Network, As Pei Defines, Consists Of Only Three Institutions: The Domestic Security Protection Unit (DSP) Affiliated With The Police, And It Is A Political Police Par Excellence That Does Not Care About Ordinary Crime But About Monitoring Opponents, And The Community Police Stations Spread In Every Neighborhood, And The Ministry Of State Security (MSS) And Its Local Branches That Undertake Monitoring Of Foreigners And The Educated Elites And Organized Groups. These Three Institutions Are The Ones That Receive Orders From The Political And Legal Affairs Commissions, And They Are The Ones That Implement The Distinctive Chinese Method In Repression: Not Mass Arrest, But Close Surveillance, And Summons For Talking, And Veiled Threat, And Neutralization Through Restricting Movement, Especially During Sensitive Periods.
And Sensitive Periods Are A Central Concept In The Book. For The Party Has Its Own Security Calendar: The Anniversary Of Tiananmen On The Fourth Of June, And The Annual Parliament Meeting In March, And The National Congress Of The Party, And Visits Of Foreign Leaders. Before Each Of These Occasions, The Sentinel Machine Enters A State Of Maximum Alert. Veterans And Complainants Are Summoned, And They Are Asked Not To Leave Their Cities, And Additional Cameras Are Placed, And Hotel Owners In Beijing Are Forced To Report Any Guest Coming From The Provinces. In The City Of Tianjin, For Example, The Book Reveals That Its Local Committee Was Holding A Video Conference Every Evening During The Period Of The Two Parliamentary Sessions, And Receiving Daily Reports From The Police And Other Apparatuses To Coordinate Efforts, And Its Senior Officials Make Personal Field Visits To Ensure The Monitoring Of Key Categories.
It Is A State That Leaves Nothing To Chance. A State That Believes That Stability Is Not A Natural Result Of Development, But Is A Product That Must Be Manufactured Daily Through Diligent Bureaucratic Work. And This Is What Makes It, In Pei’s View, More Advanced Than Any Previous Dictatorship. For It Did Not Solve The Dilemma Of Repression Through More Repression, But Through Organizing Repression And Making It Smarter And Less Politically Costly In Appearance. But This Organization Carries Within It The Seeds Of Its Weakness And Disintegration.
If The Book “The Sentinel State” Had Contented Itself With Describing The Security Bureaucracy Of The Chinese Communist Party, It Would Have Been An Important Book, But It Would Not Have Been A Revolutionary Book. Its True Revolutionary Nature Lies In The Place To Which It Takes Us After That: From The Air-Conditioned Offices Of The Political And Legal Affairs Commissions In Beijing And Shenzhen, To The Narrow Alleys Where “Grid Workers” Work With Worn Shoes And Paper Notebooks. Here Pei Minxin Flips The Table On The Prevailing Narrative About China As A Purely Digital Surveillance State, And Reminds Us Of An Obvious Truth That Technology Lovers Forget: There Is No Algorithm That Can Smell The Smell Of Anger In A Poor Neighborhood, And There Is No Smart Camera That Understands The Tone Of Grumbling Of A Laid-Off Worker.
The Most Important Chinese Invention In The Last Two Decades, As The Book Argues, Is Not The Facial Recognition System, But Is “Grid Management”. This Idea Is Simple In Appearance, Ingenious In Implementation, And Terrifying In Its Effects. The Idea Is Based On Dividing Every City And Village In China Into Small Squares, Each Square Comprising Between Two Hundred And Five Hundred Families, That Is Between Six Hundred And One Thousand Five Hundred People. And For Each Square There Is A Dedicated Employee, Called “Grid Worker” Or “Grid Manager”, Whose Only Function Is To Know Everything About This Square. Not Only Who Lives In It, But Who Frequents It, And Who Quarreled With Whom, And Who Lost His Job, And Who Has A Relative In Prison, And Who Publishes Angry Comments On The Internet.
In A City Like Beijing, Today More Than Seventy Thousand Full-Time Grid Workers Work. In The City Of Wuhan, The First Epicenter Of The Epidemic, Their Number Exceeded Twenty Thousand. These Are Not Police Officers, But Local Employees With Meager Salaries, Often From Graduates Of Vocational Colleges Or From Early Retirees, Wearing Red Or Blue Vests, And Carrying Smart Phones Equipped With A Special Application That Connects Them Directly To The City’s Command Center. Every Day, They Wander In Their Squares, Talk With Shop Owners, And Visit Families That Have “Problems”, And Record Everything: A Pothole In The Street, Or An Unlicensed Gathering, Or An Old Man Who Has Not Visited The Neighborhood Clinic For Months. This Information, Which Appears Service And Social, Flows At The End Of The Day Into A Huge Database, Where It Is Analyzed Not Only To Improve Municipal Services, But To Measure The “Stability Index” In Each Square.
And Here Lies The Dual Genius Of The System. For On One Hand, It Provides Real Services. For The Grid Worker Is The One Who Helps The Elderly Fill Social Security Forms, And He Is The One Who Reports A Gas Leak, And He Is The One Who Mediates To Solve A Dispute Between Two Neighbors. This Gives Him Social Legitimacy And Acceptance That Makes People Open Their Doors To Him. And On The Other Hand, He Is The Watchful Eye Of The Party. For He Knows, Before Any Intelligence Apparatus, That A Clothing Factory Has Not Paid Its Workers’ Salaries For Two Months, And That A Group Of Workers Began To Gather In A Cafe After Work, And That One Of Them Began To Search For A Labor Lawyer On The Internet. The Information Reaches The Neighborhood Committee, And From There To The Stability Maintenance Office, And Early Intervention Takes Place: Summoning The Factory Owner, And Warning The Workers, And Providing Small Temporary Financial Support To Extinguish The Fuse Of Protest Before It Ignites.
Pei Calls This Type Of Surveillance “Low-Tech Preventive Surveillance”, And Compares It With “High-Tech Surveillance” That China Boasts About. For High-Tech Surveillance, Such As Surveillance Cameras Whose Number Has Exceeded Six Hundred Million Cameras, And Facial Recognition Systems, And Tracking Of Mobile Phones, Is Very Useful After The Event Occurs, To Identify A Protester Or Track His Escape Route. But It Is Almost Useless In Preventing The Event From Occurring In The First Place. For The Camera Cannot Prevent A Labor Strike, But The Grid Worker Who Knows The Workers By Their Names Can Report It A Week Before It Happens.
And To Manage This Huge Human Network, The Party Created Another Layer Of Observers: The Volunteers. And Here The Numbers Cited By The Book And Almost Unbelievable Stand Out. In Beijing Alone, There Are More Than Eight Hundred Thousand Volunteers Wearing Red Badges And Standing At The Entrances Of Neighborhoods, Monitoring Strangers, And Recording Suspicious License Plates. In Many Cases, These Are Elderly Retirees Who Seek A Sense Of Importance, Or Party Members Who Want To Score Loyalty Points. The Party Offers Them Symbolic Rewards, And T-Shirts, And Honoring In Neighborhood Parties, But Most Importantly It Grants Them A Small Social Authority: The Authority To Ask “Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here?”.
This Low-Tech Army Is The One That Makes High-Tech Technology Effective. For What Use Is A Huge Database Linking The Identity Card To Train Tickets And Hotels And Hospitals, If There Is No One Who Decides That So-And-So Must Be Prevented From Boarding The Train To Beijing This Week Because He Is Likely To Protest In Front Of The Parliament Building? Technology Provides The Information, But The Decision Is Made By Man, And The Contextual Information Possessed By The Local Man Is What Gives The Dry Data Its Security Meaning.
The Book Devotes A Whole Chapter To Explaining How These Three Layers Integrate: Digital Technology As A Tool For Aggregation And Analysis, And Grid Workers As A Tool For Daily Contextual Information Collection, And Volunteers And Auxiliary Police As A Tool For Deterrence And Physical Presence In The Street. This Integration Is What Pei Calls “Hybrid Surveillance”. And It Is Surveillance That Does Not Depend On One Super Hack, But On A Dense Network Of Thin Threads That If One Of Them Breaks, The Network Remains Cohesive.
And Perhaps The Most Illustrative Chapters Of This Application Is The One That Deals With How The Party Employed Major Events, Such As The 2008 Beijing Olympics, And The 2022 Winter Olympics, And The Covid-19 Pandemic, To Expand And Normalize This Network. During The Pandemic, Grid Workers Overnight Turned Into An Army To Combat The Epidemic, Knocking On Doors To Measure Temperature, And Ensuring People’s Commitment To Quarantine. This Health Role Gave Them Unprecedented Legitimacy, And Made People Accept Their Presence In Their Daily Lives In A Way That Was Not Possible Before. And When The Pandemic Ended, This Army Was Not Demobilized, But Was Redirected To Its Original Tasks: Monitoring Stability.
In This Sense, The Sentinel State Is Not Just A Repressive Apparatus, But Is A Daily Governing Apparatus. It Governs Through Surveillance, And Monitors Through Governance. And This Is The Most Dangerous Lesson Presented By The Book: That Modern Authoritarian Systems Do Not Need To Be Scary All The Time, But It Is Enough That They Are Present All The Time. That The Citizen Feels That There Is Someone Who Knows Him, And That There Is Someone Who Will Notice If He Is Absent From The Neighborhood For Days, And That There Is Someone Who Will Ask About Him If He Gathers With Strangers. This Permanent Feeling Of Surveillance, Even If It Is Friendly And Service In Appearance, Is What Produces Obedience And Self-Discipline, And It Is What Makes The Cost Of Collective Organization Prohibitively High To The Point Of Impossible.
In The Classical Literature About Authoritarianism, There Is A Golden Rule That Says That No Matter How Effective Repression Seems, It Carries The Seed Of Its Own Erosion. And The More The Degree Of Control Increases, The More The Cost Of Maintaining It Increases, Until The Moment Arrives When The State Becomes Unable To Pay The Bill For Its Survival. Pei Minxin’s Book Does Not Fall Into The Trap Of Admiration For The Chinese Surveillance Machine, But Devotes Almost Its Second Half To Answering A Pivotal Question Avoided By Many Who Are Dazzled By Chinese Technology: How Much Does This Cost? And What Are Its Limits?
The First Cost, And The Most Obvious, Is The Direct Financial Cost. Pei Provides Shocking Numbers He Extracted With Difficulty From Local Budgets Published Intermittently. In The Year 2020 Alone, China Spent On What Is Called “Comprehensive Management Of Social Stability” Nearly One Trillion And Seven Hundred Billion Yuan, That Is More Than Two Hundred And Fifty Billion Dollars, Which Is A Figure Exceeding The Declared Military Spending. This Spending Does Not Go To Buying Fighter Jets, But To The Salaries Of Millions Of Workers In The System: The Grid Worker Who Earns Three Thousand Yuan A Month, And The Auxiliary Policeman Who Earns Less Than That, And The Volunteer Who Gets A Food Voucher, And The Neighborhood Committee Employee Who Must Remain Vigilant Until Twelve O’clock At Night During The Period Of The Two Parliamentary Sessions. These Figures, When Gathered At The Level Of A State The Size Of China, Turn Into A Black Hole In The Local Budget.
And Here The First Paradox That The Book Details In Revealing Appears. For Local Governments In China Are The Ones That Bear The Biggest Burden Of Financing The Sentinel State, While Central Resources Go Mostly To The Army And Strategic Projects. And The Localities, Especially In Poor Regions Such As Gansu And Guizhou And Yunnan, Already Suffer From Huge Indebtedness Due To Infrastructure Projects. So How Do They Finance This Security Army? The Answer Documented By Pei Through Local Audit Reports Is Through Three Mechanisms: Cutting An Increasing Part Of The Public Services Budget, And Imposing Arbitrary Fees And Fines On Citizens And Companies, And Relying On “Institutional Innovation” Which Is In Reality A Polite Name For Organized Corruption. For The Police Station That Is Asked To Recruit Twenty Informants, And Does Not Have A Budget For That, Resorts To Confiscating Violating Motorcycles And Selling Them, Or To Imposing Fines On Internet Cafes Under The Pretext Of Not Registering The Identity Of Customers.
This Leads Us To The Second Cost, Which Is The Bureaucratic Cost And Corruption. The Sentinel State, As Pei Describes It, Is A State That Creates Perverse Incentives. For The Basic Criterion For Evaluating The Performance Of A Local Official Is Not Economic Growth Or Citizen Satisfaction, But Is “The Non-Occurrence Of Mass Incidents”. That Is, The Official Is Punished If A Protest Occurs In His Region, Even If He Was Not The Cause Of It, And Is Rewarded If The Sensitive Period Passes Quietly, Even If This Calm Is Artificial Through Forcibly Relocating Protesters Or Imprisoning Them In Illegal “Legal Education Centers”, Which Are In Reality Black Jails. This System Encourages Systematic Lying. For Instead Of Solving The Problem That Causes The Protest, Such As A Dispute Over Land Or Corruption In A Factory, The Local Official Resorts To Hiding The Problem And Preventing Its Arrival To Beijing. And This Is What Pei Calls The “Information Dilemma”: The More The Density Of Surveillance Increases, The Less The Truthfulness Of The Information That Reaches The Top, Because Each Level In The Chain Has An Incentive To Hide Failure And Inflate Success.
The Documents Cited By The Book About Evaluating The Performance Of Community Police Illustrate This Dilemma Blatantly. For The Policeman Is Evaluated By A Points System: Four Points For Monitoring “Key Populations”, And Two Points For Collecting Information About Falun Gong, And Two Points For Recruiting New Informants, And So On. This System Turns Security Work Into A Race To Collect Points. So The Policeman Records Fake Visits To Key Persons, Or Recruits Informants From His Relatives And Friends Without Any Real Intelligence Value, Just To Complete The Quota. In The City Of Baishan In Jilin Province, For Example, The Domestic Security Protection Unit Claimed That It Formed “Friendships” And “Work Relations” With Two Hundred And Forty-Nine Individuals, And Recruited Sixty-Five Spies Explicitly, In Only One Year. These Huge Numbers Appear Heroic In The Annual Report, But In Reality They Hide The Truth That Most Of These “Friends” Are Just Names On Paper.
The Third Cost, And The Most Dangerous In The Long Term, Is The Cost Of Legitimacy And Social Cohesion. For The Sentinel State, No Matter How It Tries To Present Itself As A Friendly Service State Through Grid Workers, Remains In The Eyes Of Wide Sectors Of The Population A Parasitic State. For Repeated Knocking On Doors, And Summons For Talking, And Monitoring Of Phones, And Request To Register Guests Coming From Outside The City, All This Creates A State Of Silent Resentment, Especially Among Educated Youth And The Urban Middle Class. Pei Cites Testimonies Of Lawyers And Journalists And Former Activists Talking About How Close Surveillance Did Not Prevent Them From Opposition, But Turned Them From Reformist Opponents Who Want To Improve The System, Into Radical Opponents Who Want To Change It Entirely. For When A State Security Officer Comes To The Home Of An Academic To Ask Him Not To Sign A Petition, Or When A Student Is Forced To Attend An “Ideological Guidance” Session, That Does Not Produce Loyalty, But Produces Suppressed Hatred.
And Here The Book Reaches A Very Precise Point: That The Success Of The Sentinel State In Preventing Large Collective Protests Is At The Same Time The Reason For Its Failure In Preventing The Accumulation Of Individual Anger. For The System Is Very Good At Preventing Ten Thousand Workers From Gathering In A Square, But It Is Completely Unable To Prevent One Million Workers From Hating It Each Individually. This Atomized Anger, Unorganized, Does Not Constitute A Direct Security Threat Today, But It Constitutes A Fertile Soil For Any Future Crisis. For When The State’s Ability To Pay Collapses, Or When A Sharp Economic Crisis Occurs, Then This Accumulated Anger May Suddenly Turn From A Silent Individual State Into An Explosive Collective State, Exactly As Happened In The Soviet Union.
Finally, There Is The Cost Of Technology Itself. For The Book Refutes The Myth That Technology Made Surveillance Cheap And Easy. For It Is True That One Camera Is Cheaper Than A Policeman, But A Network Of Six Hundred Million Cameras Needs A Giant Data Center, And Fiber Optic Cables, And Maintenance Teams, And Algorithm Engineers Who Earn Fabulous Salaries, And Electricity That Does Not Stop. And Most Importantly, It Needs Humans Who Watch The Recordings And Analyze Them. Chinese Artificial Intelligence, Despite Its Progress, Still Remains Unable To Understand The Political Context Of A Sarcastic Joke On Weibo, Or A Metaphorical Phrase Traded By Workers. Therefore, The Human Element Remains The Weakest And Most Expensive Link.
With This Analysis, Pei Places Us Before A Picture Not Of A Strong Invincible State, But Of An Anxious, Exhausted State, Spending A Huge Fortune To Stay In Its Place, Like A Person Running On A Treadmill At Maximum Speed Just To Not Fall. And This Exhaustion, And This Feverish Race, Is What Will Lead Us To The Big Question: How Long Can The Sentinel State Continue? And Is Its Model Exportable And Sustainable, Or Is It Just A Long Transitional Phase Before A Coming Explosion?
We Now Reach The Final Chapter Of This Journey To The Chapter In Which Pei Minxin Leaves Aside The Garb Of The Neutral Historian, And Wears The Cloak Of The Strategic Thinker Who Asks: And What After? For After He Explained To Us How The Chinese Communist Party Built Its Terrifying Machine, And How This Machine Works On The Ground Through A Mixture Of Bureaucracy And Humans And Technology, And After He Revealed To Us The Exorbitant Cost Of This Machine And Its Internal Cracks, Comes The Question That Every Reader Awaits, And Every Decision Maker In Washington And Brussels And Moscow And Tehran: Is This Model Viable To Survive? And Is It Exportable?
The Answer Provided By Pei Is Not A Simple Answer With Yes Or No, But Is A Complex Answer Of A Researcher Who Spent His Life Studying Authoritarian Regimes. For He Argues That The Sentinel State Has Succeeded With Brilliant Success In Achieving Its Direct And Most Important Goal: Preventing The Repetition Of The 1989 Scenario. For Since The Early Nineties Until Today, China Has Not Witnessed A National Protest Movement Across Classes And Regions, Capable Of Threatening The Survival Of The Party. All The Protests That Occurred, And They Are In The Thousands Annually, Remained Local, Isolated, And Limited In Demands: Workers Demanding Late Salaries In A Factory In Guangdong, And Village Residents Protesting Against Confiscation Of Their Lands In Sichuan, And Parents Demanding Compensation For Corrupt Vaccine In Henan. These Protests Are Contained Quickly Through A Mixture Of Limited Repression And Material Compensation And Partial Reform Promises. And In This Sense, The Sentinel State Performed Its Function: It Turned The Existential Threat Into Administrative Problems That Can Be Dealt With.
But This Success, As The Book Clarifies In Its Final Chapter, Is A Tactical Success That May Hide A Strategic Failure. For The Logic That Governs The Sentinel State Is An Entirely Preventive Logic: Do Not Let The Problem Grow. But This Logic Prevents The Party From Seeing The Big Picture. For When All Your Energy Is Focused On Preventing Workers From Gathering, Then You Will Never Think About Reforming The Labor System Itself That Makes Their Salaries Delayed. And When All Your Efforts Are Directed To Preventing Farmers From Going To Beijing To Complain, Then You Will Never Reform The Land Confiscation System That Strips Them Of Their Livelihood. In This Sense, The Sentinel State Does Not Solve Problems, But Postpones Them And Hides Them. And It Is Like One Who Takes Strong Painkillers To Relieve The Pain Of Chronic Inflammation Without Treating The Inflammation Itself. The Pain Disappears Temporarily, But The Disease Worsens Inside.
And Here Pei Puts Forward His Concept: “Surveillance Trap”. For The More Effective Surveillance Becomes, The More The System Needs It. And The More It Needs It, The More Its Cost Increases, And The Less Its Ability To Spend On Other Things Such As Education And Health And Real Innovation. For Localities That Spend Sixty Percent Of Their Budget On Stability, Cannot Build Good Schools, And This Produces A Less Educated And More Resentful Generation, Which Requires More Surveillance. It Is A Vicious Circle, And The Sentinel State Is Trapped Inside It.
This Trap Explains Why China Today, Despite Its External Strength, Appears As An Anxious State From Inside In An Unprecedented Way. In The Era Of Xi Jinping, The Sentinel State Was Not Dismantled, But Was Inflated More. The Presidential Term Limit Was Abolished, And Control Over The Internet Was Tightened Through The Cybersecurity Law, And The Powers Of The Political And Legal Affairs Commission Were Expanded To Include Even Universities And Private Companies. But This Inflation, As Pei Argues, Is Not A Sign Of Strength, But A Sign Of Weakness And Paranoia. For A System That Trusts Its Legitimacy Does Not Need To Monitor Every Citizen Around The Clock.
Therefore, The Most Important Lesson That The Book Presents To Students Of Comparative Authoritarianism Is That The Future Of Authoritarianism In The Twenty-First Century Will Not Be A Purely Digital Authoritarianism, But A Hybrid Authoritarianism. It Will Be A Mixture Of Artificial Intelligence And Human Informing, And Of Algorithms And Neighborhood Committees, And Of Facial Recognition And Knocking On Doors. And This Mixture Is What Makes It More Resilient Than Traditional Authoritarianism, And More Adaptable, But At The Same Time More Costly And More Prone To Internal Erosion.
In The Last Pages Of The Book, Pei Returns To A Foundational Moment: The Year 1989. And Reminds Us That The Chinese Communist Party, After Crushing The Student Movement, Made A Conscious Decision That Its Survival Requires Abandoning Any Real Ideological Ambition, And Being Content With One Goal: Survival. The Sentinel State Is The Embodiment Of This Decision. It Is A State Without A Dream, Without A Liberating Project, Without A Promise Of A Better Future, Except For One Promise: That No Disturbance Happens. And This Promise, Despite Its Attractiveness To Many Who Lived The Chaos Of Transitions, Is A Negative, Defensive, Exhausting Promise.
Pei Says That The Biggest Victims Of The Sentinel State Are Not The Opponents Who Are Imprisoned, But Are The Monitors Themselves. For The Grid Worker Who Spends His Day Spying On His Neighbors, And The Auxiliary Policeman Who Is Forced To Summon An Old Friend For Investigation, And The Elderly Volunteer Who Stands In The Cold To Monitor The Entrance Of The Neighborhood, All Of Them Live A Life Of Anxiety And Suspicion, And Lose Trust In Each Other. The Sentinel State, In Its Quest To Monitor Society, Ultimately Destroys The Social Fabric That It Claims To Protect.
*The Published Opinions Do Not Necessarily Represent The Opinion Of Nile Post.
