(No) Privacy Please!: How China Obtains Citizen Consent for Online Monitoring

• In Event: Accepting Big Brother: Privacy & State Surveillance in China's Digital Sphere

Abstract

One factor that should drive democratic states to be more authentically popular than authoritarian states is that democratic states have significant constraints on the state’s power to interfere in the lives of private citizens, particularly in limiting the power of the state to surveil its citizens. However, current research on China finds that the state is both more intrusive in monitoring private citizens and more popular among its citizens than almost all democratic societies. While the causes of high degrees of state trust in China are undoubtedly multi-causal, previous survey research (Steinhardt et al., 2022; MacDonald, forthcoming) on China has also indicated a high degree of acceptance of the government’s digital monitoring of citizens, suggesting that the state’s intrusiveness does not harm (and may even help) its popularity, contrary to what has long been perceived as a comparative advantage of democratic systems.

The Chinese surveillance apparatus is arguably one of the largest and most invasive surveillance programs in world history. In the last twenty years, the Chinese government has increasingly incorporated digital technologies into its surveillance system, monitoring online behavior and using technological tools to observe citizens. In Western democratic countries, such types of government monitoring have generated significant public uneasiness and, in some cases, backlash. Yet such a backlash has not developed in China. From a theoretical perspective, this result is surprising – citizens in authoritarian regimes have more reason to fear the state and therefore more reason to be suspicious of government monitoring. One answer to this puzzle is that previous research has found an association between government trust and the level of acceptance of government monitoring in both democratic and authoritarian societies. However, as the varied reaction in both democratic and authoritarian states to different types of Covid-19-era digital monitoring and control demonstrate, the type and rationale for monitoring may also matter a great deal in how receptive citizens are to being observed. So far, this question of how citizens react to monitoring driven by different aims and rationales remains unaddressed in the existing literature.

This project employs a nationally representative online sample (n=2000) to examine the specific types of monitoring and, most importantly, the reasons for which Chinese citizens will accept government monitoring. The survey focuses on citizen attitudinal differences between surveillance that broadly serves public interest goals (such as pandemic control) and ones that primarily accrue benefits to the regime (locating dissenters or troublemakers). Included in this survey are two list experiments to help overcome preference falsification issues, a recurring problem for surveys in authoritarian contexts. Also included is a survey experiment that proposes different government motivations for a hypothetical new surveillance system (treatments) or simply describes the surveillance system (control). One of the key post-treatment questions asks about regime trust, seeking to establish whether trust can also be considered an outcome variable of surveillance activity. Finally, a statistical analysis is performed that looks at the interaction of regime trust and motivation to examine whether high-trust individuals may not be so concerned across all surveillance rationales.

The results of this survey contribute to several different literatures. They help inform the literature on trust in authoritarian regimes – what specific types of activities are likely to decrease citizen evaluation of the regime. They also contribute to the literature on online privacy in authoritarian regimes, helping to better contextualize in what context online surveillance is tolerated. Finally, they also help answer the larger question of why and how authoritarian regimes can remain more durably popular than democratic regimes despite imposing more invasive restrictions and controls on their citizens.

Author

• Andrew MacDonald, Duke Kunshan University