Can We See Our Future in China’s Cameras?

Opinion|Can We See Our Future in China’s Cameras?

I heard some surprising refrains on my recent travels through China. “Leave your bags here,” a Chinese acquaintance or tour guide would suggest when I ducked off the streets into a public bathroom. “Don’t worry,” they’d shrug when I temporarily lost sight of my young son in the crowds.

The explanation always followed: “Nobody will do anything,” they’d say knowingly. Or, “There’s no crime.” And then, always, “There are so many cameras!”

I can’t imagine such blasé faith in public safety back when I last lived in China in 2013, but on this visit it was true: cameras gawked from poles, flashed as we drove through intersections, lingered on faces as we passed through stations or shops. And that was just the most obvious edge of the ubiquitous, multilayered tracking that has come to define life in China. I came away troubled by my time in some of the world’s most-surveilled places — not on China’s account, but because I felt that I’d gotten a taste of our own American future. Wasn’t this, after all, the logical endpoint of an evolution already underway in America?

There was a crash course on the invasive reality of a functionally cash-free society: credit cards refused and verge-of-extinct paper bills spurned. I had to do the thing I’d hoped to avoid, link a credit card to WeChat. That behemoth Chinese “super app” offers everything from banking to municipal services to social media to shopping, and is required to share data with the Chinese authorities. (Elon Musk, by the way, reportedly wants to turn his own app, X, into an invasive offering modeled after WeChat.) Having resigned myself to all-virtual payments, I knew I was corralled like everyone else into unbroken visibility, unable to spend a single yuan or wander down a forgotten side street without being tracked and recorded.

Crisscrossing China as a chaperone on my son’s school trip, I felt that a country I’d fondly remembered as a little rough-and-tumble had gotten calmer and cleaner. A part of me hated to see it. In my own mind, I couldn’t separate the safe, tidy streets from the repressive system of political control that underpins all those helpful cameras.

The Chinese Communist Party famously uses surveillance to crush dissent and, increasingly, is applying predictive algorithms to get ahead of both crimes and protest. People who screen as potential political agitators, for example, can be prevented from stepping onto trains bound for Beijing. During the Covid pandemic, Chinese health authorities used algorithmic contact tracing and QR codes to block people suspected of viral exposure from entering public spaces. Those draconian health initiatives helped to mainstream invasive surveillance and increase biometric data collection.