Outsourcing Authoritarianism: the Political Economy of China’s Internet Surveillance
My doctoral dissertation, which is also my on-going book project, focuses on the engagement of private actors in the political application of technological development within the authoritarian context of China. This work examines how market actors with technological capacities are actively engaged in state control by studying the emerging industry of Internet-opinion surveillance. My research on the commercialization of China’s Internet-opinion management has been published in leading peer-reviewed academic journals, including New Media & Society and Surveillance & Society. These two papers explore the political economy of the new emerged market in which Chinese governments purchase big-data service to govern people’s online discussion in various social media platforms. Also, based on my ethnography experience of my dissertation research, my new article, which has been recently published on Ethnography, discusses why the private sector, especially technology companies, should be methodologically considered as a critical field site for future research on China’s control over digital media. In the meantime, I am currently preparing an article that explores how state actors and market actors develop various legitimation discourses of digital surveillance within authoritarian contexts.
Commercialization of China’s Internet Control
Tech-enabled Authoritarianism of China’s Social Credit System (SCS)
Since 2014, the central government of China has been constructing a nationwide SCS, which is currently on track for full deployment on 1.4 billion citizens. The SCS is designed to act as a rating system through which the state aims to determine the ‘creditworthiness’ and ‘trustworthiness’ of each individual and organizational actor by a computational score based on their historical and ongoing social and economic activities. Although the SCS project is designed to eventually be a centralized data-enabled control infrastructure, it currently consists of a variety of SCS practices operated by the central state, local government agencies, and commercial organizations.Co-authored with Professor Diana Fu, I have recently published an article on the SCS practices employed by the Chinese national government. This paper is published on the top-tier journal Governance. In this paper, we argue that the SCS is a high-tech effort by a surveillance state to divide the population into “good” versus “bad” citizens on the basis of trustworthiness. By analyzing all sixty-six national SCS policy documents and their implementation, we find that: A “good” citizen engages in state-supported civic participation rather than being a disengaged citizen; a “bad” citizen is one who violates rules and laws and/or participates in contentious political participation. In addition, for the state, it is not sufficient to cultivate individual good citizens; the Chinese state also rates organizational citizenship of civil society organizations—the wide range of community organizations, civil non-enterprise units, and foundations.
Sorting citizens: Governing via China’s social credit system
Affective Authoritarianism: Emotional Labour of State Control in China
By incorporating Hochschild’s emotional labor theory and Burawoy’ s labor process-theory into the analysis of authoritarian domination, this project aims to examine how emotional labour is systematically incorporated into the institutions of state control. This original idea of this book comes from my master’s dissertation, which has been published on China Quarterly. Building upon ethnographic observation in one Beijing petition bureau, this case study explores the emotional labor performed by grassroots officials to demobilize social dissent. It shows that officials have developed three types of emotional strategies –emotional defusing, emotional constraint and emotional reshaping – to absorb petitioners’ complaints. My second paper of this project is published on China Informaion. This paper examines the labour process of China’s mayor’s hotline system. The mayor’s hotline system is a channel set up by Chinese municipal governments to address residents’ suggestions, appeals, inquiries, and complaints. Relying on ethnogrpahic data, my work describes the emotional dimension of call operators’ work and explores the impact of outsourcing on the operation of mayors’ hotlines.
Outsourcing authoritarian governance: The privatization of mayors’ hotlines in China
Dr. Rui Hou 