Surveillance in a Leninist regime: Understanding China’s surveillance state

Professor Minxin Pei will talk about his latest book, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, which examines the Chinese surveillance state.

China’s surveillance state has attracted much attention in the media, but there is little serious research on its organization, scope, and operational tactics. Evidence gathered from hundreds of local yearbooks and police gazettes shows that the backbone of China's surveillance state is an extensive network of informants and labour-intensive surveillance tactics which is made possible and run effectively by the party's Leninist organizational structure. The adoption of hi-tech surveillance came relatively late – probably around 2010. 

The Chinese Leninist party-state has the organizational capacity unmatched by other forms of dictatorship in building and maintaining an extensive and labour-intensive network of surveillance to implement preventive repression against potential threats. Hi-tech capabilities strengthen such surveillance, but do not and cannot substitute the underlying organizational structure. 

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About the speaker

Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations. Prior to joining Claremont McKenna College in 2009, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008. 

He is an opinion columnist for Bloomberg and the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union; China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy; China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay, and The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China.

Chair: Professor Steve Tsang, Director, SOAS China Institute

Registration

This webinar will take place online via Zoom and will be recorded.

Organiser

• SOAS China Institute

Contact

• Email: sci@soas.ac.uk