The text below represents only a tiny portion of the larger Locknet project, the rest of which (including fun videos and illustrations to explain the fundamentals of the internet) is available on ChinaFile.

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The man gazes earnestly into the camera, the glow from his computer monitor reflecting off his black-rimmed glasses. “This is more than just a cultural moment,” he says with a smile. “It’s something truly meaningful. This is about mutual respect, kindness, and efforts to understand each other. This feels so good!” he exclaims in a video he posted to RedNote, a China-based social media platform similar to Instagram.

It was January 14, 2025, and Zheng Yubin was speaking in English to American users who had recently surged onto the platform—more than half a million in just two days. Noting that the U.S. and China were sometimes viewed as rivals, he enthused that “today, through this connection, we are seeing something different, a more personal and human side. It’s not just about nations, it’s about individuals . . . people who share the same hope for more freedom and a bigger world. So once again, welcome!”

Over the following weeks, RedNote, also often referred to by its Chinese name of Xiaohongshu, played host to what appeared to be heartfelt exchange, as many Chinese users embraced the influx of Americans. Users from the two countries asked each other about their everyday lives, swapped cat photos, and even did homework together.

But something less joyful lay beneath all the good vibes. The Americans had joined RedNote as a way to protest the U.S. government’s incipient ban of a far more notorious social media platform, TikTok. Advocates for blocking the app argued TikTok’s wide reach, its wealth of information on each of its users, and the obligations of its parent company under Chinese law could allow China to use it to “[sow] discord and disinformation during a crisis.” American TikTokers, unconvinced, rebelled by downloading RedNote. “Our government is out of their mind if they think we are going to stand for this TikTok ban,” a U.S.-based user said in a video posted on RedNote. “We are just going to a new Chinese app and here we are.”

Whether or not Washington’s fears were well-founded, China’s government does indeed have the means to manipulate content on China-based platforms. As a Chinese company, RedNote must obey Beijing’s censorship dictates. Some newcomers realized this when their RedNote posts containing political speech got flagged for “violations” or when they found their accounts closed. In a group chat viewed tens of thousands of times, new RedNote users discussed how to avoid getting banned for posting taboo political content; other new arrivals said they would depoliticize their posts in order to “do as the Romans do.”

Meanwhile, RedNote itself scrambled to comply with its censorship duties. In January, China’s top internet regulator reportedly told RedNote to ensure U.S. users’ posts don’t appear in China-based users’ feeds. Some foreign users then reported sharp drops in views of their content; others complained that the app only showed them content posted by other foreign users. Through outsourcing companies, RedNote began recruiting English-speaking content moderators. As of May, the company was still looking for people to help review videos posted by foreign users.

This whole cycle—the proposed ban on one app with ties to China, Americans’ flocking to another, the brief window of cross-cultural connection, and finally censorship’s closure of that window—demonstrated both the fragility and adaptability of China’s system. New technology, or new facts on the ground, can quickly open up channels for freer discussion. Authorities, both government and corporate, can also quickly close them. The RedNote saga revealed the genuine desire for more day-to-day contact between average people in both countries, one that is threatened not by a ban on TikTok, which isn’t available in China, but by Beijing’s censorship regime itself. It also highlights how unprepared the outside world is to deal with China’s censorship system, even as it becomes more entangled with our online lives.

Most people know that China censors its internet. They’ve probably even heard of the “Great Firewall,” the clever moniker popularly used to describe that censorship. But despite its increasing impact on our online lives, most people outside China don’t understand how this information control system really works. What does it consist of? How effective is it? What is its ultimate purpose? And how much does it alter the internet in the rest of the world?

This study brings a rare interdisciplinary approach to these questions. We are a computer scientist at Northeastern University, and a researcher on China’s governance and society at ChinaFile. For more than a year, we worked as a team to interview experts, review decades’ worth of academic literature and media reporting, and track policy and implementation changes over time. We brought together insights from our respective fields with insights from linguistics and political science. Working across disciplines allowed us to break down subject matter silos to gain a broad view of the interplay between the technological and social aspects of China’s censorship regime. This yielded new insights about the system’s purpose, its capacity, and its likely trajectory in the years to come. It also allowed us to clear up longstanding misconceptions and establish new frameworks for future research. Because China’s online censorship regime affects not just people living in China but around the world, it’s more important than ever for all of us to better understand the system’s mechanics, efficacy, aims, and impact.

First, imagining China’s censorship system as a “wall” mistakes its true nature. The system isn’t static, it’s dynamic, multipart, and adaptable—and concerned with far more than simply repelling foreign information at the border. The system also embodies more than just a stack of servers and wires. It intertwines human and machine into a complex apparatus that pervades the online and offline worlds.

At the same time, the system is a resource-constrained, best-guess, partially-deployed patchwork, every component of which is imperfect and subject to failure at any time. Nevertheless, it remains highly effective and efficient. By not over-engineering this system, China built information control into its domestic internet in an economical way. In most cases, “good enough” censorship gets the job done.

Over the last decade, a number of influential scholarly works, widely referenced in media reporting, held that the main goal of China’s internet censorship was to forestall protests and other forms of collective action. But the country’s leaders have a much larger ambition: They seek to remake the broader information landscape such that it alters what citizens know, and even what they think.

Living in our digitally-connected world means that you almost certainly interact with this system, whether you want to or not. China’s online censorship apparatus increasingly shapes what appears on the global internet and the infrastructure that gets it there. We ignore it at our own peril.

For years, observers argued that Beijing would have to ease up on information controls in order to safeguard the country’s economic growth. Such a heavy hand, it was thought, would hinder innovation and productivity, eventually threatening the implicit bargain the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had made with its citizenry: material prosperity in exchange for political submission. But this argument fundamentally misread the Party’s philosophy. China’s leaders view internet censorship, like a growing economy, as essential to good governance and to their continued rule—and they believe that such censorship becomes even more crucial when the economy slows and social discontent is on the rise. With this in mind, authorities have worked to forge a system that allows them to censor their internet without overly dampening economic growth. So far, they’ve been able to have their cake and eat it too.

Another common assumption held that China’s own people would slowly undermine the censorship system from the inside, engineering so many workarounds that it would eventually become too porous to function properly. But this assumed the system was beating back a tide of ardent “netizens” thirsting for unfiltered information. Yet, when was the last time you sought out foreign news in your second, or perhaps even third, language? In reality, most Chinese internet users appear to thirst after the same things all of us do: TV shows, sports scores, and cat videos, ideally in our native tongues. Even if it’s possible to evade the censorship system, the question is not just one of technical capability but of motivation. Often, just a little bit of friction, like a lack of circumvention tools for sale in the app store, or a slow or glitchy connection, is enough to convince people not to bother. After all, if Chinese users so fiercely desired the kinds of cross-cultural bonds that flourished briefly on RedNote, they might find ways to sign up for Instagram (banned in China) en masse. Instead, they largely stick to the services they can get from local app stores.

Of course, China’s online censorship system hasn’t withered away. Nor has its porousness doomed it to failure. The system remains indispensable to Beijing, and so Beijing has made sure it can grow and adapt in response to the internet itself.

And as the internet insinuates itself ever deeper into our lives, so does the chance it brings China’s censorship along with it.

More Than a Wall

Many countries censor the internet to some degree. By blocking specific content, or by limiting access to certain sites or services, states from Venezuela to Uzbekistan circumscribe what their citizens can see online. Some countries, such as Russia and Iran, have extensive filtering systems that allow their governments to monitor both content and the users who post it. North Korea simply doesn’t allow most people to get online at all.

But no other censorship regime rivals China’s in scale and complexity. Unlike Pyongyang, Beijing sees the value in letting its citizens visit cyberspace—and in fact continues to bank its governing and economic capacity on networked technologies. This means that China has, in some ways, a much more difficult row to hoe than North Korea. China needs the internet, but not all of the internet. It must find the means, across a large geographical area, and for more than one billion users wielding a wide array of commercially-produced computers, cell phones, and smart watches, to limit what information gets transmitted from one point to another.

For most people outside China, the mention of Chinese censorship immediately brings to mind the moniker “Great Firewall.” As a metaphor, “Great Firewall” passably describes the digital fence Beijing has built along its borders. A barrier made up of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of independent devices, it inspects internet traffic flowing in or out of the country—think of security guards manning border crossings—and disrupts connections it finds carrying objectionable content. In so doing, the Great Firewall conducts “network-level censorship”: monitoring internet traffic transiting the broader internet infrastructure, irrespective of who sent it, or from which platform. China’s network-level censorship tools, while individually rudimentary, work in tandem to create a system unrivaled in scope. They do so by violating underlying internet norms, like expectations of privacy and authenticity, to take advantage of the good faith and trust built into ordinary internet functions.

Even so, network-level censorship can only monitor information leaving or entering China. Internet traffic within China—a WeChat message sent from Guangzhou to Shanghai, say, or a video being streamed from Liaoning to Anhui—never comes into contact with the Great Firewall. But China seeks the option to censor any traffic that might reach its citizens, not just traffic originating abroad. This is where “service-level censorship” comes into play. Beijing has tasked “services” such as blogs, social media apps, and gaming platforms with conducting censorship on its behalf. This holds for any company hosting content in China, not just Chinese ones. Because most, if not all, such platforms have their own corporate content policies that they enforce through post deletion, account blocking, or upranking and downranking, they already have the means to enforce the government’s censorship mandates; a platform can just as easily delete a post that violates its advertising policies as one that calls for the downfall of the Party. The distinction between content moderation and censorship lies not in who does the deleting, but on whose orders the deleting is done.

And this is how RedNote found itself facing both a business bonanza and a political crisis at the same time. In almost any other context, a company would greet a large influx of new users as an unalloyed good. In China, such a breakthrough brings with it the possibility of danger: What if the new users can’t be adequately constrained?

Companies like RedNote don’t censor their users because they necessarily want to, but rather because it is a condition of operating in China. China explicitly requires companies hosting user-generated content to close, blacklist, and report to the government all accounts that “create and publish rumors, stir up hot societal topics . . . and transmit illegal or negative information, creating a vile impact.” Similarly, the government expects average users to “interact civilly and express themselves rationally.” Such rules cover just about any entity, human or corporate, that might post or host something online, giving the government a legal basis for removing content and penalizing offenders. An internet-specific bureaucracy, along with law enforcement and the justice system, ensures that punishments, when levied, have real bite.

These three filters—network-level censorship, service-level censorship, and regulation and enforcement—aim to purify what is circulating on China’s domestic internet. The latter two filters manage content produced within the physical confines of China’s borders, or within the digital confines of a China-based app, while the first filter, network-level censorship, handles content that authorities can’t stifle at the source. Together, they form a socio-technological apparatus that can reach into both the digital and real-world lives of Chinese citizens, if and when it so chooses.

A censorship system this large undoubtedly costs the Party-state a pretty penny in research and development, new hardware, and day-to-day upkeep—but no one knows exactly how much. In 2021, researcher Ryan Fedasiuk used available government budgets to estimate that “Chinese government and CCP offices engaged in internet censorship likely spent more than $6.6 billion (nominal USD) annually on related activities. Accounting for purchasing power parity, the number is likely closer to $13 billion.” This calculation is missing a large chunk of central government spending, which isn’t made public. It also doesn’t include the costs borne by private industry, meaning it’s likely a significant underestimate. The expense of this system stems from the assumptions baked into its design: any citizen could be up to no good, therefore the system’s substantial cost is proportional to the total population and not to the number of actual offenders.

The censorship system’s complexity belies the idea that it is merely a wall. The “Great Firewall” suggests an attempt at impermeability, a hard, static barrier running along the border keeping invading information at bay. But the metaphor fails to capture the scale and dynamism of the system as a whole. Beijing doesn’t just stand sentry over its digital borders, it monitors and censors information flows within the country as well. Moreover, the censorship system was never designed to be impermeable. Instead, it uses the most efficient means possible to minimize the quantity of “dangerous” information available to Chinese citizens online. Impermeability is expensive, and not all that much better, from a practical perspective, than simply filtering out the majority of unwanted content.

In practice, online censorship in China functions more like a massive water management system: an amalgamation of canals and locks that regulates what flows, through which particular channels, and at what times. It adjusts to natural rises and drops in volume, though it can be overwhelmed during a flood. Even when the sluices close, it’s not perfectly impermeable; ripples can always slosh over the edge. This can happen in both directions: a gush can surge in from the outside or what was meant to stay in can leak out.

Just as a system of locks and sluices surrounding a man-made lake can regulate the lake’s water level while tides or rivers flow in and out, so China’s online censorship system can ensure the information circulating through the country’s digital spillways mostly conforms to Beijing’s changing whims. The result is a national intranet that links up with the global internet but manages internal information flows according to its own rules. The result is what we have dubbed “the Locknet.”

Good Enough, Enough of the Time

The Locknet may be multifaceted and adaptable, but that doesn’t mean it’s always at the cutting edge of technology. Nor is it foolproof; a system contending with a population as large and as online as China’s will inevitably allow some unwelcome content to seep though. Still, the Locknet only needs to be good enough, enough of the time, for enough of the population, in order to be effective.

Take, for example, a Censorship conducted by equipment placed within an internet network, aimed at all traffic that transits that network. This may include machines positioned throughout an ISP’s network, or machines positioned at international gateways that are designed to handle all internet traffic passing through those gateways. tool deployed in November 2021. The tool blocked fully-encrypted communications in real time. This was a significant accomplishment for China’s censors, for whom fully-encrypted traffic is a real headache. Such traffic appears as a jumble of random, indecipherable characters and symbols, leaving censors to guess whether it represents something innocuous, like a business Zoom call, or whether it is actually banned content trying to evade the censorship dragnet. But even the apparently random jumble does contain some patterns, allowing China’s censors to create several basic rules to identify it. So instead of using a sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithm to monitor traffic in real time, censors programmed the new tool with simple pattern-matching rules like “if more than a certain percentage of these random characters are human-readable, block the traffic.” In this way, the network-level censorship system continues to use basic computing techniques to counter emerging communications technologies.

The network-level censorship system isn’t even composed of a single set of unified hardware. Instead, censors have cobbled it together over the years with equipment from multiple different vendors. “We expected that censorship infrastructure in China was largely monolithic,” says Dave Levin, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, describing his mindset before a set of 2020 experiments. Instead, the results he and his fellow researchers saw made them realize the system is probably much more heterogeneous. “The most logical explanation, and our new mental model, is that it’s a lot of different boxes” with different operating systems and different flaws, “which likely means different manufacturers.”

Within this patchwork system, individual components sporadically fail. For instance, during busy times of day, too much internet traffic can flood the network-level censorship system and allow otherwise censorable traffic to slip through. Computer scientists have repeatedly found that somewhere between 3 and 25 percent of “sensitive” traffic somehow makes it past the system to its final destination, even without any effort to evade censorship. As one study put it, network-level censorship is “more a panopticon than a firewall, i.e., it need not block every illicit word, but only enough to promote self-censorship.”

Censorship conducted by a company or entity monitoring the censorship on its own platform or service. This can be accomplished through both manual and automated means, but it only targets the content available on the platform or service in question. also doesn’t block every illicit word, but rather implements more precisely-targeted deletions that quell certain unwanted conversations without stifling all chatter. Take the word “Tiananmen,” which can refer not only to the public square in the heart of Beijing but also the government’s massacre of civilians there in 1989. “People think it’s totally blocked. It’s not,” says Sandy Lu, Lead China Subject Matter Expert at Two Six Technologies’ Media Manipulation Monitor, which tracks how governments worldwide manipulate content online. “They let people say, ‘Oh yeah, I went to Tiananmen!’” Social media companies like Weibo, a platform that Lu follows closely, have human moderators that do more careful curation of potentially threatening discussions: “They’re taking the most sensitive ones, the ones with the highest engagement rate. You nip those in the bud,” she says. “You find the root of the narrative and kill that, and you kill the conversation.” Because of this precision targeting, relatively few posts get pulled off Weibo on a daily basis. Only about 2-3 percent of the posts Lu monitors get deleted, which she is careful to point out are not a representative sample—but this also doesn’t count posts that the company automatically blocked before they ever appeared online.

Another relatively rudimentary service-level censorship method involves keeping specific apps off citizens’ phones entirely, through a practice known as “meta-censorship.” Many foreign apps—and sometimes even entire classes of apps, like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which allow users to access otherwise blocked foreign content—are not available from app stores in China. (For members of certain persecuted groups, like ethnic Uyghurs in northwestern China, having a banned app on your phone can lead to fines or even detention.) In turn, meta-censorship leads to “platform substitution,” whereby domestic Chinese users end up engaging mainly or exclusively with apps developed in China rather than those more widely available abroad. Greatfire.org, an organization that tracks online censorship in China, reports that in Apple’s app store, in particular,

66 apps (61%) out of the 108 most downloaded apps worldwide are unavailable to Chinese iOS users . . . none of [the top 10 most downloaded apps worldwide] are accessible to Chinese users. Five apps are simply not available in China’s App Store, while the remaining five, though available, are blocked by the government and cease to function once installed on a user’s device.

In 2023, Beijing codified its dominion over corporate app stores; regulations now require any mobile apps to get approval from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology before they can appear in China’s app stores. Chinese companies have no choice but to work within these constraints. Foreign companies like Apple have opted to accept them in order to gain access to the Chinese market. Much of Beijing’s censorship power, therefore, derives simply from its role as a gatekeeper to one of the largest customer bases in the world.

Internet users themselves supplement network- and service-level censors. 22 Chinese internet users interviewed by researchers in 2024 all “reported practices of self‐censorship before posting online,” often simply opting not to post because “it is useless to speak.” The interviewees also “assert[ed] that they have a clear understanding of the ‘boundary’ between sensitive and insensitive topics, enabling them to navigate discussions online carefully” despite the fact that “none of them can clearly draw the line, nor do they draw the same line.” Similarly, a survey conducted in 2015 asked more than 2,000 respondents “whether they had ever changed the content of what they intended to write on a blog, Weibo post, WeChat message, forum post, or other online post so as to avoid being censored . . . nearly 25 percent indicated that they had done so several times and approaching 7 percent said they had done it many times.”

However, though many internet users in China clearly engage in some level of self-censorship, most people don’t go through their days thinking of ways to view or post banned material. One study gave Chinese university students access to the uncensored internet via a A computer application that makes use of both encryption and a proxy server to keep censors from seeing the true destination of a user’s internet traffic. In common parlance, the terms “VPN” and “proxy” are used interchangeably to describe a technology that helps evade censorship. (this took place in the mid-2010s, when it was still possible to conduct such a study, and to reliably use VPNs at scale). The authors found that many students didn’t even bother to try out the VPN, and, among those who did, they didn’t seek out uncensored news unless they were specifically encouraged to do so. Most humans, it seems, really do just want to watch cat videos online. For the rarer people who do spend their time thinking of ways to evade censorship, China’s system can track and harass them individually, in both cyberspace and in real life.

Indeed, “people experience the Chinese internet in extremely varied ways,” says Daniela Stockmann, Professor of Digital Governance at the Hertie School in Berlin. “There are people who believe the internet is very censored, that they don’t have space to talk about hot topics or issues of social and political relevance. Other people think the internet is an incredibly diverse space. Of course, it depends on the topics you want to talk about and what platforms you’re on.”

But people’s experience of China’s cyberspace varies not just based on the content they’re seeking. Other factors also affect what they’re able to do online. Are you an elite academic or a businessperson whose work requires some additional access to international internet services? You may have access to a government-approved VPN that allows you to bypass some censorship. Are you trying to connect from Henan province, where authorities recently implemented their own, additional network-level censorship system? You may be subject to “dual-layer censorship,” with both the national-level system and the provincial-level one limiting what your computer can reach. “In Henan, specifically starting in 2023, people started noticing that there [were] hardly any websites they [could] access,” says Ali Zohaib, a Ph.D. student at the Security & Privacy Lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Zohaib and his colleagues found that Henan’s Censorship conducted by equipment placed within an internet network, aimed at all traffic that transits that network. This may include machines positioned throughout an ISP’s network, or machines positioned at international gateways that are designed to handle all internet traffic passing through those gateways. system blocked more than 10 times as many domains as its national-level counterpart, including entire domains such as “.com.au” and “.co.za.”

No matter a user’s profession or location, no one is completely safe from crossing Beijing’s red lines. That’s because the red lines themselves aren’t static. Lists of forbidden topics can change, and certain groups of people can suddenly find themselves under mounting political scrutiny—as has happened to LGBTQ individuals and Hui Muslims over the past decade. Even members of such groups who strive to live within the bounds of the politically permissible may become politically impermissible simply by virtue of who they are.

The Locknet’s imperfections, and the vagaries of its implementation, can make it quite difficult to understand what the Chinese government is blocking at any given time. Is something blocked, or did it simply get dropped by overloaded equipment? If it is blocked, is it blocked for everyone, everywhere, or only for certain people, or in certain locations, in certain contexts, or on certain apps? Is the block intentional, or simply collateral damage from an unrelated content ban?

From the outside, the Locknet’s flaws can be hard to see. But failing to recognize these flaws can lead to inaccurate ideas about what content remains online. Let’s say a foreign website has cleverly disguised what authorities would deem “subversive” content and is still accessible in China. What does this tell us? That authorities have chosen not to block it? That someone within the censorship system secretly supports what it says and hopes to get the word out? Not necessarily. Such conclusions would be warranted if China conducted network-level censorship with what computer scientists call “allowlists,” only allowing access to pre-approved websites and services. But China’s system generally relies on blocklists, only blocking sites, services, and keywords already identified as problematic. (The sheer volume of problematic content can make it easy to forget that, in fact, much more content is not blocked at all.)

This means that “subversive” content might be accessible in China for a number of different reasons:

• First, yes, authorities may have chosen to allow it through. But this is only one possibility.
• Second, authorities may not know it exists, if it is indeed cleverly disguised or otherwise not caught by the automated dragnet. As yet, the censorship system can only block what it has been told to block. Novel formulations of “subversive” content won’t necessarily trigger any tripwires.
• Third, authorities may know about it but have judged it not important or dangerous enough to bother with. The system doesn’t need to be perfectly watertight, just good enough most of the time. There are likely plenty of cases, especially when considering the differing priorities of central and local authorities, when even “subversive” content just doesn’t rise to the threshold of concern.
• Fourth, authorities may want to block it but have decided that the cost of doing so is too high. This seems to be the case with the code-hosting website GitHub, popular with computer programmers and very useful to China’s burgeoning tech industry. Beijing initially blocked GitHub in 2013, but quickly backed down after public outcry. Since then, GitHub has been accessible in China only some of the time—clearly still a source of anxiety for authorities, but still too economically important to cut off completely.
• Finally, authorities may want to block the “subversive” content but do not yet have the capability. If the website in question uses new technology to serve up its content, China’s censorship system may not yet have developed a technical countermeasure.

In sum: internet content is available in China either because authorities like it, don’t know about it, don’t really care about it, don’t want to pay the cost to block it, or don’t have the means to block it. Notably, only two of these five possibilities represent a situation in which authorities have willingly allowed content to remain online. In the other three scenarios, they’re either unaware, incapable, or grudgingly accepting of its presence.

In the early days of the internet, it was easy to see gaps in technological capacity or enforcement as proof that savvy citizens could always evade the system—or even as reason to believe that some of the system’s gaps were intentional, a concession to public sentiment or economic reality. But this assumed that the censorship system’s goal was perfection: a pristine national intranet, populated only with pre-approved content. Instead, the system aims for adequacy, which is more than enough to achieve Beijing’s political ends.

By focusing on the system’s current failings, we miss the longer-term trajectory: the CCP generally achieves its internet censorship goals, whether it takes days or decades. The regime has the motivation, the patience, and the physical access to ensure that its dictates reign supreme in the end.

Just as in the casino, so it goes on China’s internet: eventually, the house always wins.

Making Thoughts Unthinkable

Beijing does not merely censor undesirable content. It also works to fill the void left behind by injecting or promoting favored content. Sometimes, the addition and subtraction of internet content takes place in the open. The government may announce it has suspended several platforms for lax censorship, or given out “positive energy” awards to the most “heart-warming or ideologically sound stories, photos, and people” appearing online.

In other cases, the processes of deletion and promotion are deliberately kept hidden. A user might search for facts about COVID-19 or the South China Sea, and receive bowdlerized search results, without knowing anything has been omitted. Similarly, that same user might find their social media feeds dominated by accounts that platforms have upranked at the government’s behest. This is known as covert censorship. Some American users of RedNote experienced such covert censorship when they discovered they were only able to see videos posted by other foreigners and not any from Chinese users.

China’s information control system increasingly relies on covert censorship, perhaps because, as political scientists Juha A. Vuori and Lauri Paltemaa explain, “in its ideal form, censorship is totally invisible, and is able to make thoughts unthinkable, not just uncommunicable. Here, censorship aims to affect the formation of discourses, not just their contents. For that to happen, the user must not be aware that the contents . . . are being censored.”

Vuori and Paltemaa have also shown that China’s censorship apparatus implicitly distinguishes between “dangerous” and “bad” information, something made apparent by how long certain terms remain blocked online. “The longer a word remains filtered, the more lasting danger it constitutes for the political system,” Vuori and Paltemaa write. “Dangerous” words, censored for at least one year, “either dealt with the ‘hard core’ of the political system and its functioning, or opposition to it.” “Dangerous” words included those that referenced topics such as the Politburo Standing Committee or national leadership succession. By contrast, merely “bad” words, blocked for shorter periods of time, presented only a temporary threat to the regime. The authors categorized these “bad” words as related to “Incidents, Scandals, Corruption, Crime/Misbehavior, Place Names, Disharmony/Unrest and Company.”

To the best of our knowledge, the Chinese government hasn’t proclaimed the “bad”/”dangerous” distinction anywhere; indeed, the more “dangerous” a topic, the less the government publicly discusses censorship of it. And yet, online platforms must still use this distinction, and other such implicit government direction, as a template for their Censorship conducted by a company or entity monitoring the censorship on its own platform or service. This can be accomplished through both manual and automated means, but it only targets the content available on the platform or service in question. efforts.

Like social media companies the world over, individual Chinese platforms publish their own content policies, designed to guide user behavior and offer clear boundaries the platform can use to police user-generated content. These content policies include both company-imposed rules (like forbidding competitors’ advertisements) as well as government decrees (such as forbidding pornography). They often include detailed examples of prohibited material. Yet, in abiding by the government’s unwritten rules, platforms can provide explicit examples only for relatively innocuous information. When proscribing more “dangerous” content, platforms tend to just repeat vague government jargon; to give more specific examples would be to mention the unmentionable.

Paradoxically, this makes corporate content policies an excellent guide to the topics China’s leaders most want to conceal. When a company describes a forbidden topic in generic or hazy language, that is often a sign authorities consider it “dangerous.” WeChat’s content rules, for example, offer up the following illustration of prohibited, but not “dangerous,” gambling-related content:

A screenshot from WeChat’s “Standards of Weixin Account Usage,” taken March 20, 2024.

By contrast, WeChat provides no explicit examples of what kind of content “damages national honor and interests” or “subverts state power.”

This ambiguity holds even when a user has already violated the rules. A respondent to a 2024 survey told researchers that, even though they had appealed to WeChat more than 20 times after finding their account blocked, they still couldn’t get any more information about their transgression: “They only tell you that you are breaking the rules, but they can’t tell you exactly what the rules are, or what I am posting that is breaking the rules.”

For certain types of “dangerous” information—like the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989—Beijing doesn’t just remove content, but also seeks to “memory-hole” knowledge itself. Ideally, memory-holing eventually purges all traces of “incidents” such as June 4th from individual and collective consciousness. Of course, platforms still need their employees to know enough about memory-holed information to effectively delete it, creating a tension between the ultimate goals of censorship and the practical needs of implementation. Last year, an employee at a major Chinese internet platform described to an interviewer how the company handled this tension:

We’ve had training about evil cults, like Eastern Lightning [a banned spiritual group]. But it was just a PowerPoint presentation. No photos were permitted. As soon as it finished, the company quickly took everything away. All of the company’s training is secretive like that. My impression is that they need us to know about these things to do our job properly, but at the same time, they’re afraid of us knowing too much. They’d prefer we forget everything after executing their instructions.

This awkward tension between erasure and execution recurs throughout the system, affecting both man and machine. The platforms have a unique challenge: they must create actionable rules for their human employees and automated systems about topics that, from a political perspective, don’t exist. Their coders must know enough verboten information to properly program the platform’s content review algorithms, even if the government’s ultimate goal is that no one, not even the coders, know such information. Moreover, the platform’s users can never be explicitly warned against discussing “dangerous” information. Platforms have to tell their machines “no June 4th,” but they can’t tell their users “no June 4th.”

And this gets at the heart of the broader information control system: The goal is not just to limit what people see and say, but ultimately to limit what they know and believe. What many people think of as the system’s objectives—forestalling collective action, minimizing criticism of the government—are indeed present, but they only represent the system’s more tactical aims. The longer-term strategy is far more ambitious. To quell more distant threats, the Party hopes to cultivate an information landscape that won’t allow unwanted thoughts to grow.

Sloshing over the Edge

A censorship system as powerful and pervasive as China’s can’t be contained by a line on a map. Censorship conducted by equipment placed within an internet network, aimed at all traffic that transits that network. This may include machines positioned throughout an ISP’s network, or machines positioned at international gateways that are designed to handle all internet traffic passing through those gateways., Censorship conducted by a company or entity monitoring the censorship on its own platform or service. This can be accomplished through both manual and automated means, but it only targets the content available on the platform or service in question., and even self-censorship all sometimes spill out over the border.

At the network level, technical tools designed to stop domestic users from reaching foreign websites can also affect users outside China. All it takes is for a foreign user’s internet traffic to transit China, however briefly. Because the internet’s traffic control systems assume all networks operate in good faith and by the same set of rules, they route traffic through China just like they would anywhere else, based on network congestion or availability. Of course, any traffic routed through China is subject to its network-level censorship—which means someone in Thailand could find themselves blocked from getting to the ChinaFile website (which is banned in China) if their traffic just so happens to cross the wrong border.

At the corporate level, any company hoping to make an online product that functions identically inside and outside of China will have to build Beijing’s censorship rules into that product. The wildly popular online video game Marvel Rivals, co-developed by the California-based Marvel Games and the Zhejiang-based NetEase Games, indeed follows these rules. The game doesn’t allow players to type phrases like “free Tibet,” “free Xinjiang,” “Uyghur camps,” or “Taiwan is a country” in the in-game chat, no matter where in the world the players log on. Marvel thus helped create an international product that has the effect of imposing Chinese censorship on global users. How many more companies will make, or are already making, a similar choice?

And, as Chinese companies assume a greater role in global standard-setting and infrastructure-building, Beijing’s ideas about basic internet norms and technologies are making their way into international discussions. The Chinese multinational Huawei has already deployed censorship-friendly technologies in places like Uganda, Rwanda, and South Africa. These technologies explicitly subvert long-standing expectations of user privacy in service of greater efficiency. The governments that control them won’t necessarily use them to surveil or censor their citizens, but the latent capacity is there. Global uptake of such technologies would reduce the ability for users around the world to safeguard their own freedom of expression.

China’s leaders treat speech, expression, and free access to information very differently from their counterparts in liberal democracies. These views, and the values that underlie them, shape the country’s laws and permeate China’s domestic internet infrastructure. In an increasingly digital world, that means their impact is global.

Americans’ behavior during the RedNote episode revealed how unprepared many of us are to deal with the Locknet. Though many TikTokers claimed the proposed ban would violate their First Amendment rights, a large number of the self-described “refugees” flooding RedNote hastened to sanitize their content to suit the Chinese government’s restrictions on speech. The irony of this self-censorship seemed lost on many of them, as did the true nature of censorship enforcement in China. One exiled activist wrote at the time, “The same complaint that brings you to RedNote have [sic] brought countless Chinese to jail. And the very app #RedNote you are using now is part of the state machine that white-washes the Uyghur, Tibet and Hong Kong issue, as well as silencing the entire voices of political prisoners, scholars, civil journalists, filmmakers, LGBTQ and feminists . . .”

Without a real understanding of what Chinese censorship is, those of us outside China could well end up enforcing it ourselves.

Additional reporting by Wenhao Ma.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile.

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To Supplement Law Enforcement, Local Governments across China Are Recruiting Citizen “Vigilantes”

In a video posted to a Chinese social media platform, young women in crop tops, Hello Kitty t-shirts, and jeans pose together in the middle of an empty, tree-lined road. Electronic dance music plays in the background, the singer crooning in English, “Tonight I wanna drown in an ocean of you.” Then, as the beat drops, the volunteers suddenly appear in crisp black uniforms, complete with caps, boots, and epaulets. They march confidently, determinedly, towards the camera, their feet hitting the pavement in time with the song.

These women are members of the “Shangrao Vigilantes,” an all-volunteer group that advertises itself as supporting and supplementing the local police. The Shangrao Vigilantes, named after the city in Jiangxi province in which they are based, also posted a similar video featuring male volunteers.

Additional social media clips show the Shangrao Vigilantes, and other similar groups, guarding school gates in order to keep children safe from street traffic, or, as dramatized in one video, to prevent attackers from entering school grounds. Other common activities include street patrols, waterfront patrols to prevent drownings, directing traffic, conducting traffic stops, and mediating local disputes, such as a conflict between two neighbors over the placement of an air conditioning unit.

In one video, over stirring music, a deep male voice intones, “Even though they are not police, they embody the volunteer spirit of communal governance, justice, bravery, and dedication.” Stills flicker across the screen, featuring black-uniformed individuals marching through the streets at night and staging group photos in front of police stations. “Fighting shoulder to shoulder with police forces, they come from all walks of life.”

In some ways, “vigilantes” are the opposite of what their name suggests: rather than rogue agents meting out street justice, they are individuals deemed trustworthy by authorities, working under the guidance of local police forces, deputized to surveil their fellow citizens. In recent years, as Beijing has encouraged the “masses” to take a greater role in public safety, vigilante groups—and their close cousins, “safety promotion associations”—have sprung up across the country, working with the police to conduct traffic stops, mediate disputes, or even “catch [suspects] on the spot.” Indeed, China’s police are likely in need of some help. Despite perceptions to the contrary, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) police forces are undersized and underfunded, and they must contend with a level of crime much higher than official statistics suggest. Volunteers likely serve as a bolster for law enforcement, taking on patrol duties and handling low-level incidents in the police’s stead. Keeping such cases out of police hands may also keep them off local crime registers, helping local officials make it seem like crime has dropped on their watch. But more than anything, these volunteers serve as another corps of eyes and ears to help the state enforce its vision of a “stable” society—one in which discontented citizens present no threat to the Party, their complaints having either been promptly addressed or promptly silenced.

Vigilantes and other safety promotion groups are merely the newest iteration of the Party-state’s effort to enmesh citizens in its broader grassroots surveillance and control project. Since the mid-2000s, authorities have employed “grid workers” to monitor the comings and goings in assigned quadrants of their neighborhoods, reporting any unusual or alarming incidents to their higher-ups, as part of a “grid management” system that aims to improve the provision of government services and quash illegal behavior, including protesting.

In 2013, with encouragement from General Secretary Xi Jinping, official media revived a mostly-dormant, Mao-era concept known as “the Fengqiao experience.” During the turbulent class struggle of the 1960s, Fengqiao, a town in Zhejiang province, “mobilized” residents to deal with the “enemies” in their midst; this often meant people informed on their own friends and family. Mao Zedong praised the effort as an example of the masses’ “[taking] part in the general work of public security.” When Xi invokes it today, the Fengqiao experience is less about intrafamilial betrayals or class struggle. Instead, it is deployed to valorize citizens’ monitoring of one another. As Lynette Ong writes in Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China, “during the Xi Jinping era, mass mobilization has been revamped as a political strategy to legitimize increased state control of society.” This has not only reinvigorated the influence of traditional local power brokers, such as members of local residents’ committees, but has also increased authorities’ appetite for deploying volunteers to monitor and report on their neighbors.

Beginning in the mid-2010s, localities throughout China began to establish hundreds of non-governmental associations dedicated to “safety promotion.” In southern China’s Guangdong province alone, the public security department claimed in late 2022 that 670,000 citizens had registered as members of nearly 200 such groups. This is equivalent to one in every 190 Guangdong residents, or more than three times the size of Guangdong’s regular police force. Even more recently, localities have seen the formation of similar, volunteer “vigilante” groups. Some such groups are set up by local Party Politics and Law Committees, though many of them are registered as non-governmental organizations—meaning their exact status remains somewhat murky, and it’s not always clear who established them.

But only in the last few years has Beijing moved to codify the integration of volunteers into local policing. In October 2022, the Party Congress work report—an authoritative document that communicates the Party’s priorities for the following five years—for the first time used the phrase “mass prevention and control” (群防群治). This term refers to ordinary people’s (“the masses”) involvement in public security work (“preventing” and “controlling” low-level crimes or other unwanted behavior). The term’s inclusion in the report signaled the Party’s elevated focus on citizen participation in managing public security concerns. In March 2023, the Ministry of Public security released a three-year plan emphasizing front-line, grassroots police work; the plan included the requirement to “develop and strengthen mass prevention and control forces; improve urban and rural (community) security associations in accordance with the law; actively cultivate ‘vigilantes’ and other such public safety-related social organizations; and encourage mass prevention and control forces to become redder, more organized, more informatized, and more youthful.”

To entice potential volunteers, authorities offer perks and sometimes even cash rewards. One safety promotion association in Shenzhen’s Bao’an District hands out cash to those who catch suspects. The Huiji district, in Zhengzhou, Henan province, awards “points” which can be spent in a “points mall.” One volunteer, describing his vigilante organization on Douyin, mentioned the discounts available to volunteers at hotels and stores, as well as “preferential policies” that offer unspecified benefits to parents enrolling their children in school.

But volunteers may also have more civic-minded motivations for joining up. Describing the “Chaoyang Masses,” a group of citizens in the Chaoyang area of Beijing who voluntarily inform the police about “suspicious” activities, Ong writes that volunteers “see the opportunities to serve as a genuine badge of honor. Albeit less ideologically charged, they are close cousins of the activists in the Mao-era, who were willing to devote themselves to the Party . . . Chaoyang volunteers receive financial rewards for clues provided to the police, but they are fundamentally motivated by a desire to serve the community and a sense of responsibility in maintaining neighborhood security.”

The volunteers who respond to these enticements appear to be a motley bunch—a mix of students, retirees, and middle-aged workers. One village government says its vigilantes are local cadres, Party members, and veterans, in addition to “mass volunteers.” The Shangrao Vigilantes aimed to cast an even wider net in their recruitment; in 2023 the group formed a “Didi Vigilante Brigade,” enlisting drivers from the ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing as volunteers who could report “clues” and other information in the course of their normal jobs.

Systematically recruiting taxi drivers fits in with the overall profile of “informants” that authorities have long depended on to provide information about the goings-on in a community. As Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese governance at Claremont McKenna College, writes in The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, local officials often seek “stability-maintenance informants” among people working “jobs in which they can inconspicuously observe people and activities around them. Security guards, residential custodians, taxi drivers, bus drivers, sanitation workers, and parking lot attendants thus make especially desirable informants.”

Little surprise, then, that although such volunteer groups are nominally grassroots civil society organizations, they maintain close ties with law enforcement. At least some groups receive training from local police. Local Party commissions often provide ongoing guidance to them. One government website in Shenzhen describes the local safety promotion association as a branch of the Party Committee.

And authorities in locales across China have sought both software and physical infrastructure to better manage civilian volunteers. In one district in Beijing, the local Politics and Law Commission shelled out nearly two million renminbi (U.S.$275,000) in August 2023 for hats, armbands, and vests for the area’s “mass prevention and control” force. A district in Henan province paid almost 2.4 million renminbi (U.S.$330,000) in May that same year for an online platform with WeChat integration, allowing police to dispatch volunteers to a specific location and monitor their progress, while allowing volunteers to “report anti-terrorism clues” or upload video showing them “acting heroically for a just cause.”

Companies providing such software explicitly link it to “mass prevention and control.” On its website, Shenzhen Lolaage Technology claims that in just one district of Shenzhen city, Guangdong province, police use the company’s “visual management platform” to oversee more than 45,000 members of local “mass prevention and control” teams. Lolaage describes its products as “weaving a dense information network” and helping “to achieve overall social order throughout the area,” noting that “the police’s strength is limited, but the people’s strength is boundless.”

A graphic on the Shenzhen Lolaage Technology website touts “real-time video dispatching, one call and hundreds of responses.”

The strength of the police is certainly limited. Local forces have struggled with funding and manpower for years. “Much has been made of national budget figures showing that China spends more on internal security than it does on national defense,” writes Clark University Political Science Professor Suzanne Scoggins, but “the figures do not translate into a financial windfall for ground-level police.” The police only receive a portion of central-level funding allocated for “internal security” (additional recipients include the para-military People’s Armed Police, the Procuratorate, and the Judiciary, among others). At the same time, local governments often do not have the funds necessary to make up the budgets for their police departments. Central government-mandated caps on numbers of local government employees also hamstring police stations which might otherwise hire more officers. To get around this limitation, many localities have relied on “auxiliary police,” paying them lower salaries and offering them less training than sworn officers. Volunteers may create opportunities for further cost-cutting, by allowing police stations to drop a significant number of auxiliary police officers from their payrolls. Radio Free Asia reported in November that “authorities across the country are starting to lay off auxiliary police officers and merge local police stations with a view to outsourcing much of their daily work” to “vigilante” groups.

The PRC’s actual crime rate is almost certainly far higher than official statistics maintain, according to sociologist and criminologist Børge Bakken. “From central propaganda departments to local administrative police performance practices, crime numbers are manipulated in uncountable ways. . . For instance, it is impossible to have one of the highest global inequality measures plus an extremely high rate of stranger homicides, and yet claim one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.” This means that underpowered police forces are almost certainly facing more criminal activity than publicly acknowledged.

In some cases, volunteer organizations appear to be stepping into the breach. In Guangdong province, government procurement tenders show that police are indeed leaning on civil society to help with more serious crimes. In 2022, Nancun township (part of the provincial capital of Guangzhou) contracted with the Nancun Safety Promotion Association to help with more than 40 different tasks, such as “preventing and cracking down on homicide cases (including the detection of homicides arising from petty disputes, murders, explosions, etc.)” and “cracking down on gun violence, property theft, trafficking of women and children, gambling, and organizations bringing prostitution into the area.” Similarly, the website for a different Guangdong safety association lists catching and transferring suspects to police as one of the association members’ main duties, and describes monetary awards offered for particular deeds done or injuries suffered, implying that the safety association volunteers are indeed involved in something akin to police officers patrolling a beat. Another one of the Shangrao Vigilantes’ social media posts even features a drug bust: during the course of what is described as a “regular drone patrol,” the group discovers a rooftop full of opium plants. The volunteers then accompany police to the home in question, where police proceed to dispose of the plants and, based on tips from neighbors, bring the alleged cultivator to the local police station for questioning.

Volunteer police may also help deflate official crime statistics, whether or not they actually depress crime. As The Economist reported, China’s “miraculously” low crime rate is at least partially the result of intentional underreporting: “Apart from simply ignoring them, there are several ways to keep cases off the books. Neighbourhood committees, which are run by the party, occasionally manage disputes . . . Sometimes victims are encouraged to informally seek compensation from perpetrators.” Similarly, University of Macau Sociology Professor Jianhua Xu has shown that local police sometimes encourage area residents to call police stations directly, rather than the official emergency hotline, to keep offenses from being added to local crime tallies. One police officer told Xu, “We used to hand out pamphlets, asking people to report to our community police office, instead of calling the 110 hotline. For some minor cases, we could handle them in our community police office. You’d better not make our community look very unsafe.”

Maintaining a low official crime rate serves multiple political purposes in the PRC: It bolsters the image of the Chinese communist Party (CCP) as a competent and effective ruling party, and it helps local leaders in their quest for promotions. In another study, Xu notes that crime rates in the city of Guangzhou seemed to follow the political calendar, rising dramatically as new police chiefs took office and dropping steadily during their tenures, leading the author to conclude that published crime statistics should be “understood as part of a legitimization apparatus in China.” So, by simply managing lower-level issues before they get to the police, the work of vigilantes may both free up police for more serious work as well as keep crime numbers at a politically acceptable level. This means that reports from localities in Guangdong and Hunan provinces touting drops in crime following the formation of safety promotion associations only really convey a decrease in measured crime, not necessarily a decrease in crime itself.

Of course, the Party-state aims to quash popular protest as much as it does crime, and volunteers help with this too. Another government procurement notice for the Nancun Safety Promotion Association indicates as much: It noted that the group should work to persuade petitioners—individuals seeking redress from higher-level authorities, often for perceived injustices at the hands of local officials—to return to Nancun from Beijing. During sensitive periods, the Association would keep 24-hour watch over “key persons” (a euphemism for anyone the Party-state considers potentially politically threatening), of which, at the time of the contract in 2021, there were 24. Around the time of the 70th anniversary of the PRC, the Association would organize 300 people from each village to assist the police with guard duty, paying them 150-180 renminbi (U.S.$21-25) per day. A separate tender from 2022 directed the Association to carry out a variety of activities under the rubric of “stability maintenance”: monitoring and managing migrant workers and “key groups,” as well as “preventing and properly resolving mass incidents” (another euphemism for group gatherings, including peaceful protests, the government doesn’t like).

Even if these volunteer groups cost less than sworn police officers, or auxiliary police, local governments and Party offices still often contribute funding to their formation and maintenance. Just how much the Chinese government spends on these groups overall remains unclear. In Nancun, where a quirk of procurement rules means that government outlays to the area’s safety promotion association are made public, the town government spent more than 9 million renminbi (or nearly U.S.$1.3 million) between 2020 and 2023. China has hundreds of associations with similar names, and likely many more with different appellations.

Local businesses sometimes also contribute to such organizations. In 2021, during the opening ceremony for the Longhua District Safety Promotion Association in Shenzhen, a local Party official announced that 11 area firms had donated 5.8 million renminbi (U.S.$800,000) to the Association’s fund. The leaders of a local security company and a real estate company became the Association’s chairman and honorary chairman, respectively.

Ultimately, however, civilian volunteers should not be viewed simply as a low-cost replacement for the police. They function as yet another layer—in addition to the police, grid workers, facial-recognition cameras, and online monitoring and censorship—of the PRC’s surveillance regime. Writing about the importance of intensive, low-level human surveillance as part of this regime, Claremont McKenna Professor Pei notes the key role informants play in such a system: “[S]ocial trust is the bedrock of collective action and therefore, in a dictatorship, to be feared. Political spying thus kills two birds with one stone: it identifies potential threats to the regime and it sows distrust among the population.” Will vigilante groups and safety promotion associations, drawing volunteers from the communities they patrol, make residents feel safer, or more surveilled? Or both?

And what dangers might a phalanx of minimally-trained volunteers present to the public, or even to themselves? Are volunteers putting themselves in harm’s way when they “catch suspects on the spot”? Are they at risk of harming other citizens if they decide to over-zealously “defend law and order”? “We know in criminology, if you have unprofessional people doing all these things, they will be very corrupt,” says the criminologist Bakken. “It will be chaotic.”

And yet, even without formal law enforcement training, volunteers still play a critical role in the CCP’s control apparatus: that of a buffer. As Lynette Ong notes in Outsourcing Repression, having citizens conduct “repressive acts,” such as coercing two feuding neighbors to come to a settlement, generates less backlash than deploying the police for the same purpose. As Xi Jinping’s administration has consistently worked to insinuate itself ever deeper into citizens’ daily lives, it comes as no surprise that authorities want fine-grained, hyper-local intelligence about every corner of society. By taking on some surveillance and coercive duties, vigilantes can serve as something of a cushion between an overbearing state and the citizens it targets, while still providing the information—and control—the regime demands.

Vera Liu provided research for this article.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile and was republished on Foreign Policy.

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Swirling around in brightly-colored inflatables the shape of flying saucers, riders grin as they skid across the ice, bouncing off one another in a winter version of bumper cars. Nearby, more people pedal “ice bikes” and row sleds that look like dragon boats. Others steer snowmobiles along a go-cart-style track. Children glide along in “princess horse-drawn carts” pulled by diminutive steeds.

This winter amusement park, in China’s far northeast, about 100 miles from Vladivostok, comes stocked with snowmobiles and bumper sleds courtesy of the local United Front Work Department (UFWD). In most parts of the world, the UFWD is known—if at all—as a secretive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organ conducting influence operations abroad. But in Gonghe Village, the local UFWD ponied up nearly one million renminbi in 2022 to purchase “snow sports equipment” for the recreation area, including not just sleds but also items such as safety nets and anti-slip mats. “Gonghe Village . . . takes the development of the ice and snow industry as an important opportunity,” said the village head in a video posted to Douyin, China’s version of Tiktok. “We are strengthening the lifeblood of the rural collective economy in the new era, and taking a solid step towards strengthening the village, enriching the people, and revitalizing the countryside.”

Given the United Front Work Department’s reputation abroad, funding an “ice and snow amusement park” might seem anomalous. This is the organization that has allegedly helped set up illegal Chinese police outposts in the United States, inserted talking points into Italian political discussions, and cultivated members of parliament in New Zealand to gin up support for China’s domestic policies, activities in line with what the U.S. Congress has described as the Department’s “goal of softening opposition to the Chinese Communist Party and its policies throughout the world.”

Yet despite its insidious cloak-and-dagger image in U.S. political debate, the United Front’s mission is neither particularly covert nor aimed solely at people outside China’s borders. “There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work,” writes China researcher Alex Joske. “This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else.”

“Previous coverage of United Front work has given the impression that its main operations are overseas, which is the opposite of the truth,” says Neil Thomas, Fellow for Chinese Politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “It’s primarily a domestic apparatus whose tentacles extend beyond China’s borders.” To better understand what “United Front work” means in the domestic context, ChinaFile reviewed some 2,500 procurement notices and related materials posted to the Chinese Government Procurement Network website between January 2018 and May 2023. (Information about Gonghe Village’s amusement park costs came directly from a procurement notice announcing the winning supplier.)

Whether the UFWD is buying 24,000 “ethnic unity enters the home” tea sets in Sichuan, or putting surveillance cameras outside 85 different places of religious worship in Shandong, it is pursuing a single mission: namely, to seek out individuals and groups in society outside the Party’s control and cement their status as friends rather than enemies. This mission speaks to the deepest needs and fears of the CCP. Rather than allow for an independent civil society that coalesces around common interests, the United Front aims to yoke influential sectors of society to the Party, reining in their behavior while harnessing their strength and momentum. In general, the Department proffers carrots, in contrast to the sticks wielded by the police and state security organs. Yet, for people whose identities the Party finds threatening, the United Front employs a heavier hand. Though the UFWD’s purchases cannot reveal the ultimate success or failure of any given initiative, they can tell us how the Department is spending its money—and thereby hint at where its priorities lie.

“People don’t appreciate how wide-ranging United Front work is, and it has continued to expand,” says Gerry Groot, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, whose book Managing Transitions describes the UFWD’s historical role in easing the CCP through turbulent stages of China’s political and social development. “The nature of its work has expanded as China has changed with economic success. Now that they’re having problems, its importance will be stressed again. It will be used to manage frictions created by the economic downturn.” The Xi Jinping administration has emphasized united front work over the last decade, indicating how crucial this Bolshevik concept is to its vision of China’s governance.

The idea of the united front was born in 1917 during the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks allied with smaller factions of socialists to ensure their survival as they battled for control of Russia. Once in power, they quickly made contact with revolutionaries in China. Through most of the 1920s, the Soviets directed the nascent Chinese Communist Party to ally with its political rival, the much larger and much better-resourced Kuomintang, in order to serve the USSR’s own geo-political ends.

“If you look at it from Stalin’s perspective, he wanted to make sure the bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, would retain a pro-Soviet orientation, and this was done by infiltrating communists into the party,” says Sergey Radchenko, a historian of Russia and China at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Stalin’s idea was: a bigger party which we control through a smaller party.”

This cooperation came to a bloody end when the Kuomintang attacked the Communists and their sympathizers in the spring of 1927. But even after spending nearly a decade dodging Kuomintang assaults in the countryside, the CCP once again allied with the Kuomintang in 1936 to oppose invading Japanese forces. The CCP formed this “Second United Front” under pressure from Moscow, which wanted to prevent Japan from creeping too close to the Soviet border. It was in this context that Mao Zedong made his oft-cited comment describing the United Front as one of the Party’s “magic weapons,” along with military struggle and Party building, that would allow the CCP to triumph over its enemies.

After Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, and against Soviet wishes, the CCP pursued a “united front” with intellectuals and members of other political parties, aiming to isolate and defeat the Kuomintang, with which it was now engaged in a civil war. By the time the CCP emerged victorious in 1949, the United Front Work Department was already an established part of the Party’s governance firmament.

Since then, the UFWD’s political might has waxed and waned. “Mao himself lost interest in United Front work after 1956, favouring confrontation and ‘class struggle’ over conciliation,” writes University of Adelaide’s Groot. “It was nevertheless revived each time the Party had to recover from a Mao-induced crisis.” Upon Mao’s death, the leadership leaned on the UFWD to help reinvigorate foreign business and investment ties. For a brief moment after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, it seemed as though the Party might grant more autonomy to United Front allies, such as the eight legally-sanctioned, if largely powerless, “minor political parties.” But as the reputational damage from Tiananmen faded away with time, so did the leadership’s attention to the UFWD.

That has changed under current Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. The Department’s clout has grown significantly in recent years, researchers studying the UFWD overwhelmingly agree. Xi, by dint of both his father’s and his own work experiences, has had a lifelong front-row seat to united front work and describes it as a means to “Chinese people’s great rejuvenation.” In 2015 alone, the Party convened its first high-level conference on united front work in nearly a decade, created a governance group to direct united front efforts and stacked it with high-ranking leaders, and released regulations to “strengthen and standardize” united front work and “consolidate and develop the patriotic united front.”

More recently, in March 2023, CCP ideological guru Wang Huning—one of the few individuals to work closely with each of the last three leaders of China—took charge of the united front portfolio in his new role on the country’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Wang now sits atop the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the government counterpart to the United Front Work Department, and oversees all united front work more broadly.

Perhaps most importantly, a significant restructuring between 2015 and 2018 added a host of new bureaus to the United Front Work Department’s existing architecture. The Department went from seven bureaus to twelve, subsuming several state organs (and their funding) as well as streamlining the flow of power directly down from the Party center. The new formation reflected the increasing complexity and importance Beijing ascribed to the Department’s tasks.

The UFWD’s revamped org chart serves as a list of the social sectors it seeks to influence. The Department maintains at least one bureau for each of the following:

• Members of one of the eight officially-sanctioned, non-CCP political parties (a largely vestigial inclusion at this point; though these parties do conduct their own activities, they are not independent; the UFWD has long vetted all memberships in these parties)
• Participants in the “non-public economy,” which translates to entrepreneurs and private businesses, including companies with foreign investment
• Individuals in the “new social strata,” namely, the managers and technical staff working in the “non-public economy”; people working in new media; notaries, accountants, lawyers, auditors, industry associations, and chambers of commerce; and freelancers—basically, professionals and knowledge workers
• “Xinjiang,” both the geographical region itself, as well the people—most notably members of the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz ethnic groups—that live there
• “Tibet,” similar to the Xinjiang bureau, covers the Tibet Autonomous Region as well as its inhabitants
• Other non-Han ethnic groups (besides Tibetans and Uyghurs, the Chinese state somewhat arbitrarily recognizes 53 additional groups)
• Religious believers (this work is split between two bureaus, one of which focuses on specific religions, the other of which has functional responsibilities, such as overseeing religious schools)
• People of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan
• “Overseas Chinese,” a term (华侨, Huaqiao) that technically only includes Chinese citizens living abroad, but in practice also often includes former Chinese citizens, their offspring, or anyone with Chinese ancestry (华裔, Huayi); this work is also split between two bureaus, one of which has a geographical focus and the other of which specializes in media, culture, and educational efforts
• Intellectuals not affiliated with the CCP, as well as influential individuals who have made “positive contributions to society” and are not affiliated with any political party—essentially, people viewed as thought leaders and role models, but who don’t fit into any of the other categories

This list represents the sectors of society the Party deems both potentially dangerous and socially influential, requiring dedicated efforts to induce loyalty.

Within each of these sectors, the UFWD must identify people to approach individually. To make its outreach more comprehensive and efficient, the Department has long compiled detailed information about specific targets. In a secret missive from 1940, the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee (then only part of an upstart Communist Party fighting against both the Kuomintang and Japan) exhorted cadres to take a more methodical approach to their united front activities:

In the past there was a lack of conscientious investigation and deep understanding of the targets of united front work. We have to carry out a general analysis and have a general understanding of each party, group, stratum, friendly army, etc.; and we must carry out a many-sided, deep, and detailed investigation of the figures actually representative of each party, group, stratum, friendly army, agency, circle, and body. A detailed investigation and separate written record is to be made of these persons: name, age, native place, financial activities, history, changes in thought, political activities, habits, character, peculiarities, social relationships, etc. Without this kind of investigation and record, united front work will become empty and unrealistic.

Now, United Front offices throughout the country are bringing their dossiers into the Internet age. Procurement notices call for “smart” or “big data” platforms to “informatize” UFWD work, helping to identify “talents” in society and recruit them as “members” of the united front. In 2019, Beijing’s Dongcheng district spent 1.4 million renminbi on a “comprehensive management platform” that would, in part, “effectively support the four aspects of United Front talent work: ‘discovery, cultivation, utilization, and management’.” The platform would include a database of

basic information about members, as well as information about their familial relationships, educational background and degrees, specialized or technical positions, vocational qualifications, itinerant work or job changes, recruitment or probation, administrative or Party positions, job performance, assessments or inspections, religion (for religious figures), coming back to or returning to reside in China, and business (for individuals in the non-public economy and the new social strata).

The database would allow UFWD officials to generate “statistics on, or browse and query the information of, all types of united front members,” as well as “gather and sort united front members by performance.”

Whether or not such “science-ification, standardization, and intelligentification” efforts can ameliorate the UFWD’s longstanding recruiting problems is another matter entirely. According to Groot, the Department struggles to find individuals that can serve its interests over the long term. In some cases, this is because the Department doesn’t advance targets’ career paths; people with political ambitions will often just join the CCP directly, rather than submit to the supervision of the UFWD as a member of one of the eight “minor parties” or as a business representative. In other cases, such as individuals who belong to targeted ethnic or religious groups, contact with the UFWD taints them in the eyes of their communities, making them less useful to the UFWD. “In many cases, once the United Front Work Department IDs and recruits them, then these people immediately start losing their value,” says Groot. “They’re compromised through their connections with the United Front Work Department.”

Recruiting challenges aside, the Party clearly still finds the United Front a vital component of its governance strategy. Even though the CCP successfully vanquished rivals to the throne, morphing from a scrappy force conducting guerrilla warfare in the countryside to the ultimate authority over a major global power, it still sees a need to approach and co-opt any parts of society outside of itself. And the United Front Work Department is a key mechanism by which the revolutionary CCP hopes to forestall any further revolutions.

The United Front Work Department uses a variety of different tools to appeal to its selected targets. Its primary method simply involves outreach: holding events, trainings, media tours, and the like. Targets the Party regards as more persuadable may only come into contact with this side of the UFWD’s toolkit. Individuals in the “new social strata,” for example, might be treated to a “large-scale celebration to commemorate the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s 40th anniversary” like the one the UFWD bid out in 2020. Members of the “new generation of private entrepreneurs” might attend a multi-week training course, like the one the United Front contracted out to Northwest University in Xi’an, including three “study trips” to other provinces, tea and art salons, and athletic activities. UFWD outreach to target groups living abroad also involves some China-based activities: a leadership camp including university students from Taiwan, for example, or a summer camp for children of Chinese descent. The Department does conduct outreach to target groups it deems “sensitive,” such as religious adherents, or members of particular ethnic communities, but supplements this with a host of additional, sometimes more coercive means.

Another major undertaking, and one that is perhaps surprising to anyone who only knows the UFWD as a shadowy influence peddler abroad, is provision of basic goods and services. For example, local United Front offices have contracted out for at least 100 road improvement projects since 2018. Many of these projects took place in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, an area in southern China with a relatively high population of non-Han residents as well as high levels of poverty. Beyond just road improvements, local UFWDs issued hundreds of tenders for a wide variety of infrastructure and development projects, from expanding access to drinking water to promoting the raising of laying hens, from installing lighting in rural public spaces to building “supporting facilities” for a “macadamia nut industry base.”

Infrastructure projects like these make sense given the United Front’s larger mission, says Matt Schrader, an advisor for China at the International Republican Institute. “This is a core function of the UFWD—collecting the needs of target groups and translating them into policy. One clear throughline for United Front work, from its very early stages in the 1930s, is close attention to the needs of target groups and knowing what the Party can do for them. It’s a kind of customer service-oriented mindset. You see the phrase ‘fix their problems’ over and over again.”

Groot notes that “the downside of these policies is that they’re all part of assimilationist policies as well.” Building better roads, for example, “reduces the obstacles to making [non-Han people] more mainstream. Letting people more easily come in, letting people more easily go out—and marry out—allows for greater integration, breaking up local clans, and for greater assimilation.” Over the last decade, as the Party-state has solidified its intent to promote a single, overriding “Chinese” identity, rather than encourage the organic development of multifarious ethnic identities, it has called for “extensive contact, exchange, and blending of all ethnic groups,” including through “two-way migration and flow of the population” and living in “blended” communities.

Other United Front projects have similarly assimilative aims, sometimes with the paradoxical goal of highlighting the “characteristics” of non-Han ethnic groups. One 2021 procurement notice from Guangxi, for example, offered more than 8 million renminbi to help develop the tourism industry in the Xiaodubai “ethnic minority characteristic village,” through improvements such as a “night scene lighting system” and “ethnic wall paintings.” In China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province, where members of the officially-designated Korean ethnic group are concentrated, United Front officials wanted contractors to reconstruct a “Korean culture street.” The work described in many of these notices suggests the “Disneyfication” of the original village or street, as long documented in tourist areas across China, and more recently observed as part of the CCP’s campaign of surveillance and repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

According to Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and co-author of the book <a href=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Hidden-Hand/Clive-Hamilton/9780861540280 target=_blank>Hidden Hand</a>, which describes the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to influence political and social life around the world, the Party-state does welcome some degree of cultural diversity among its population, “as long as it is toothless.” But for the Party to permit open displays of difference, it must first feel secure in the underlying sympathies of a community. “Disneyfication is great for that. You make money off tourism, you talk about how much respect you have for ethnic diversity, but you get rid of anything that can challenge Party control,” Ohlberg says.

A tender for the “Into the Li People: Large-Scale Cultural Documentary Fieldwork Event” in Guangxi explicitly highlights such aims. UFWD authorities sought to create propaganda emphasizing the Li ethnic group’s fealty to the Party. The project would “invite renowned contemporary literary figures to spend nearly a month in ethnic areas of our province . . . to look back on the Redness of the Li people . . . and promote exchange and blending between all ethnicities in our province, as well as promote a unity of ideals, beliefs, emotion, and culture in all ethnic groups.”

The United Front Work Department’s activities become more blatantly intrusive when targeting individuals the Party views as potentially threatening. This includes people in ethnic and religious minority groups, whose community affiliations may provide a sense of identity more potent than Chinese nationalism or love of the Party.

Hui people may comprise only 30 percent of the population of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, just south of Inner Mongolia. But the Party-state worries their Muslim religious adherence poses an inherent threat and so keeps close tabs on their houses of worship. UFWD authorities in at least three Ningxia localities sought contractors to audit the finances of or directly conduct bookkeeping for “religious activity sites,” in part to ferret out any non-reported income and to enumerate any of the sites’ fixed assets.

Throughout the country, local United Front Work Departments are making purchases so that they can better scrutinize the goings-on within religious communities. Multiple tenders solicited software that visualizes or otherwise “intelligently” manages religious sites. Authorities in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in southwestern Yunnan province, wanted a “religious work grid management information system,” explicitly applying the logic of grid management—a system widely used throughout China to monitor citizens’ activities, in which localities are divided into smaller, more controllable units and government workers catalog goings-on in their part of the “grid”—to the task of controlling locals’ everyday religious activity.

International media has documented the government’s use of cameras and other such surveillance equipment in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, including at places of religious worship. But procurement notices issued by UFWDs in Shandong, Jiangxi, Hebei, Henan, and Anhui provinces show that the Party-state is conducting visual monitoring at religious sites throughout the country. Some of the notices explicitly link these surveillance programs to broader provincial or national campaigns, while others simply seek “installation and networking of video surveillance at religious sites.”

United Front officials are not content to merely observe religious proceedings. In some cases, they also seek to alter the physical structures in which they occur. Religious Affairs bureaus (government offices absorbed into the UFWD beginning in 2018) in some areas of Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan bought flags and flagpoles to install in mosques or temples, often citing the “four entrances” policy, which seeks to bring “the national flag, the constitution as well as laws and regulations, core socialist values, and China’s excellent traditional culture” into religious sites.

Several procurement notices called for contractors to “renovate” or “remodel” existing religious structures. Though the wording in most tenders left the nature of such renovations unclear, one 2021 notice clearly stated the aim of “rectifying the building style,” almost certainly a reference to the recent nationwide campaign to “sinicize” mosque architecture and remove “Arabic” elements. The mosque in question, located in northeastern Jilin province’s Huadian city, received a “historical building” designation in 2018, and Baidu Maps street view images from 2019 show it still sported the domes of the type later removed from mosques across the country, sometimes sparking local protest. That United Front officials in Huadian sought to “rectify” the mosque only three years after provincial officials granted it historic status illustrates how swiftly political dictates on religion have changed in the last decade.

The UFWD also tries to change the mindset and behavior of “religious personages.” Multiple procurement notices sought supplies, travel logistics support, and propaganda materials for a “Follow the Four Standards and Strive to be an Advanced Monk and Nun” campaign carried out across Tibet. The “four standards” refers to a campaign that since 2017 has demanded monks and nuns evince “political reliability,” “moral integrity capable of impressing the public,” and willingness to “play an active role at critical moments,” while avoiding the “control of foreign forces” and “unswervingly furthering the sinicization of religion.”

In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the United Front Work Department has abetted atrocities. As part of a campaign to install government minders in Uyghur villages and homes, one Xinjiang UFWD solicited both software and online cloud services for a management platform that tracked cadres’ efforts to build a “family of ethnic unity.” (The Department undoubtedly conducts more activities in Xinjiang than appear in the procurement notices ChinaFile reviewed; authorities have deleted many Xinjiang-specific tenders from the web and have likely stopped posting some notices publicly.)

Even innocent-seeming acquisitions can belie repressive aims. In 2022, one district-level UFWD in Tibet sought oxygen equipment for a local monastery. This purchase might appear ordinary, even compassionate, until one realizes the oxygen was meant for the “Temple Management Committee” dormitory. Throughout Tibet, state-mandated Temple Management Committees have set up shop inside monasteries and nunneries to better monitor and control religious activity. They are often staffed by cadres from elsewhere in China who are physically unprepared for the notoriously thin air on the Tibetan plateau—hence the need for oxygen. One can imagine a newly-arrived cadre, reviewing the roster of monks now under his authority, wheezing uncomfortably into an oxygen mask.

Just how deeply the United Front Work Department truly influences Chinese society—beyond the many other Party and state organs with similar aims—is impossible to pin down. This is due to the largely intangible results of its work, a lack of publicly-available information, as well as a general dearth of recent research about united front work within mainland China. But, says the International Republican Institute’s Schrader, the importance of united front work tends to be underestimated. Speaking about the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the state counterpart to the Party’s United Front Work Department, Schrader quips that it “doesn’t really do a lot, practically speaking—but neither do country clubs, practically speaking. If it doesn’t matter, why is the person that runs it the fourth-most senior member of the Party?”

Perhaps united front work also remains unappreciated because, by definition, it is less likely to generate the kinds of brutal and shocking details that draw the attention of international observers. Party writing on united front work “highlights that this is the Party’s choice instead of violence,” says the German Marshall Fund’s Ohlberg. “Before you conquer somebody violently, you try the soft way. Only when that fails can you use harsher means.”

And yet, its relatively gentle tactics notwithstanding, the UFWD tacitly seeks a change in Chinese society that is all-encompassing and profound. The impact of this change may feel slight when it comes to how the UFWD relates to, say, an atheist Han businessman who lives a workaholic lifestyle in Shanghai. While the UFWD may target him as a member of the “non-public economy,” it views his identity (non-religious, Han, focused largely on economic rather than political or social concerns) as inherently more pro-CCP than a Tibetan, a Uyghur, or even a Han church-goer. The UFWD’s ambition—to align all citizens’ gods and traditions with the Party’s interests—implicitly aspires to sand away some of the natural human texture of Chinese society.

“You could say the United Front works (together with other Party organs) to create a massive CCP Theme Park of social life, devoid of any authenticity or spontaneous expression,” says Martin Hála, a sinologist with Charles University in Prague and founder of the China-focused website Sinopsis.cz. In a fully successful implementation of its program, “all social activity would be organized and directed by designated ‘mass organizations,’ ultimately controlled by the Party. There would be just the Party-state and the mass organizations masquerading as civil society. No other social activity allowed.”{chop}

Vera Liu provided research for this article.

Neil Thomas, who is quoted in this article, works at Asia Society, ChinaFile’s publisher.

This episode of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs’ Transatlantic Currents focuses on China’s use of advanced technologies for social control. The discussion covers the origins, evolving strategy and future applications of what some experts have called a “model of digital authoritarianism.” The event recording can also be viewed on YouTube.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile.

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This week, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced it would cease collecting data on youth unemployment. The news came after nearly a decade of poor job prospects for Chinese people ages 16-24, often reported on by international media as mainly a problem affecting recent college graduates. Earlier this summer, ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke with sociologist Eli Friedman, who studies international labor, about the reasons for joblessness among China’s young people and how it is covered.

Jessica Batke: If you’re graduating right now in China, if you’re coming on the labor market, what do you see in front of you? What are you worried about?

Eli Friedman: Well, you’d be worried about getting a job! That structural reality is very much at the forefront of what college graduates in China are thinking about, and it is a big change from much of the past generation.

Since the violent suppression of the student-led movement in 1989, the state struck a basic deal with college graduates, as well as intellectuals and youth more broadly: If they stayed out of politics and they could get into college, they’d pretty much be guaranteed a decent job that would allow them to live a life significantly more materially comfortable than their parents’ or their grandparents’.

That worked really well in the 1990s, in the 2000s, through the turbulence of the 2008 crisis, and into the 2010s. Yet, even before COVID, we’d begun to see cracks in that system. COVID is its own unique moment in all of this, but coming out of COVID the underlying stresses on the system have become really apparent. The previous reality—that if you went to college, you’d be likely to graduate and get a job that allowed you to live a life that more or less matched your expectations—is increasingly not the case. People go to college and might not get a job at all. Or they might get a job but the pay, the conditions, and the hours mean that they are not going to be able to live a life that matches their aspirations. In some cases, the gap is dramatic. So there’s a lot of anxiety, and, in some cases, fear—or just “giving up.”

There is also the question of overseas students. For a long time, studying abroad in the United States, or in one of the other Anglophone countries, was seen as, if not a golden ticket, at least a pretty solid pathway to the middle class. That is no longer the case. We see that even students who have gotten into reasonably competitive universities in the U.S. or elsewhere are now worried about going back to China. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to get jobs either.

So studying overseas used to get you a little bit of an extra edge, and it really doesn’t do much for you anymore?

I think it does help some in certain industries, but a couple things have changed. One is that Chinese universities have gotten a lot better. The gap between a competitive school in the United States and a competitive school in China has shrunk. Chinese employers are seeing that and saying, “We can hire someone who went to one of the 211 or the 985 universities in China [which have been designated by the government as top-tier institutions], and they’re going to be just as well-trained, and possibly better trained, than if they went to a school in the U.S. or the U.K.” And in general, I think it’s better for students to be able to go to high-quality higher education institutions closer to home. It’s definitely a lot cheaper as compared to the United States, graduating with debt or having your family invest hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In terms of Chinese labor market dynamics, being able to say that you speak English is no longer the major mark of distinction that it might have been 20 or 30 years ago. And while the cachet of studying abroad has not been completely eliminated, I think employers are much more sensitive now. Looking at someone’s resume, they’re able to tell the difference between some very elite school like Harvard or Yale versus a fine-but-maybe-less-elite public school. So it’s a little bit more complicated than it was a generation ago.

So are more of the Chinese students studying overseas trying to stay abroad rather than return home? In the U.S., everyone’s talking about how hot the labor market is, which would suggest there are jobs available, but the government also maintains lots of visa restrictions. Do you have any sense of what these students are doing?

I don’t have any data on that, but I have seen data indicating the number of Chinese students coming to the United States has decreased. That’s for a number of reasons. Again, educational opportunities are better in China than they were a decade or two ago. In certain cases, U.S.-China hostility has made it more difficult administratively, or people have fears about being caught up in the China Initiative, which unfairly targeted people who are Chinese. But also, I think, because of a general sense of hostility; if you want to study something that’s potentially related to national security, why even bother? I believe, although I’m not 100 percent certain, that many Chinese students studying overseas have just gone to other Anglophone countries, like the U.K. So I don’t think it’s a general pulling back from study abroad, but specifically an issue with the U.S.

In terms of where Chinese students are going after they graduate: This is super anecdotal, but based on the students that I encounter here at Cornell, I’ve seen a clear shift towards more students wanting to stay in the U.S. This is part of a cultural shift that came out of COVID—so-called “runxue,” or “running away.” It includes people of that generation who are worried about what their futures will be like in China and are pretty eager to find ways to stay in other countries—the major challenges of staying in the United States notwithstanding, including visa restrictions and concerns about anti-Asian racism. Whether or not more people actually are going to stay in the U.S. after they graduate, I don’t know, I haven’t seen that data. But just in terms of my cultural currents, it’s clear to me more people are like, “If I can stay here, I would really like to do that.”

What is driving the change in unemployment for young people? You said COVID was kind of its own thing, but that we were seeing some cracks in the system even before COVID—so it seems like there are longer-standing issues at play here. It certainly feels to me like I’ve seen news articles every summer for the last 10 years about graduate unemployment in China. Is this year actually any different than the last five or 10 years, in terms of unemployment? Is it just an issue of degree? Or is there a qualitative shift that’s making this different than before?

The number for youth unemployment this year and last year is actually just about the same. If you go back and look at a year ago . . . I forget the exact unemployment figure, but it was also around 20 percent.

I should first say when I saw that number last year, I was shocked. My jaw dropped. For a long time, labor scholars had just assumed that unemployment numbers in China were manufactured. Unemployment rates going back for a couple of decades hover around 4 percent, with tiny little fluctuations. So I and most people thought, whatever, it’s one of the many manufactured numbers in China. And so when I saw this number I was like, OK, maybe China really had a very, very stable labor market for many decades. I mean, I don’t know, you never know with these things. But in any event, it was quite an acknowledgment of a systemic problem, if not a systemic failure.

This is speculation, but I think the youth unemployment issue has gotten even more attention this year because China is through with lockdowns. Last summer, China was still in the midst of all of the lockdowns, and so everyone knew that there was “artificial constraining,” particularly of consumption. It had a big effect on manufacturing as well. We saw it with COVID lockdowns in places like Foxconn and the Tesla factory and elsewhere. There was a sense that the state had taken extreme measures, restricting the economy and driving up unemployment. But we all knew that, at a certain point, the lockdowns were going to end, China’s economy would roar back to life, these problems would dissipate, and we’d go back to the previous three decades of the China boom. (I never thought that was going to be the case, but there was some hope, maybe some wishful thinking, that it would be.)

Fast forward to 2023. The lockdowns have ended chaotically, disastrously, and tragically. There was a brief burst of economic activity, or “revenge spending,” as well as increases in exports and what looked like some stabilization in the real estate market. But that very quickly petered out. It became clear by the spring that there was not going to be a return to pre-COVID assumptions about growth.

One of the reasons I think the numbers hit a little bit harder in 2023 than in 2022 is because we now understand there’s no easy fix. Last year the easy fix was to end the lockdowns, like the rest of the world had done, and get back to normal. That’s not true this year, and it raises a whole series of much more difficult questions about what ought to be done in order to address unemployment.

COVID, geopolitics, a lot of things that nobody could have predicted that put new pressures on the Chinese economy. But, if you look at the broad structural tendencies over the last 10 years, some very serious changes were always going to be necessary. That has only been intensified by contingent things like lockdowns and geopolitics.

What were the needed changes?

The main thing is the drivers of the Chinese economy, which have been exports and investment.

Exports are particularly important in the economically dynamic regions of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. They are in many ways the foundation of the China boom that took off in the 1990s—a model of growth predicated on wage suppression. The whole comparative advantage that China had, as identified by the leadership in the 1980s, was this large, relatively well-educated, very cheap workforce. It allowed them to conduct production on a scale that was unimaginable for the other East Asian Tigers, like Taiwan and South Korea, which couldn’t compete on scale, or, at that point, on the price of labor or land.

But then the cost of land and labor went up quite a lot—which I think is a good thing—but it meant that, purely on the basis of the cheapness of labor, China was no longer competitive. This was already true in the early 2010s. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, places in Latin America—wages are all cheaper in those places. And wages are much cheaper in India.

So they needed to find new ways of competing and manufacturing. The state was very clear on the need to move from a so-called labor intensive form of manufacturing to a capital- and knowledge-intensive form of manufacturing. Rather than making toys, socks, and little gadgets, they want to be making high-end electronics, medical equipment, and cars. They want to be engaged in leading-edge technologies, like electric cars, which they’ve been pretty successful at. But making that switch means it’s less labor intensive. If you have a highly automated form of production that’s turning out something very expensive, like an electric vehicle, you’re absorbing less of the labor force.

The other piece is around investments. That’s the other thing that’s really driving growth. Especially after 2008, you saw much more employment going into construction—building infrastructure, building buildings, building real estate, and all of the associated industries related to the building of things.

Steel, concrete. . .

Steel, concrete, electric wiring, things like that. It touches on manufacturing as well, because as people are building houses, they have to buy furniture and dishware and all the things that people put in houses.

Manufacturing jobs in China peaked a long time ago, in the mid-2000s, even before the 2008 crisis. Employment in construction continued to go up because of all of the building, particularly after the 2008 crisis, when the state pumped $586 billion into the economy, which mostly ended up in infrastructure spending and the real estate boom.

Spending on infrastructure, which is debt-financed, has come up against some real limits. We see this with local government fiscal stress and their inability to service their debts. We also see it in the real estate market: [major property developer] Evergrande just announced losses of [$81 billion] for the last two years. That’s just one indicator of how badly the real estate market has [done], for all sorts of reasons. China’s population is shrinking. The cost of housing is just absolutely exorbitant.

To bring us back to the question of employment: the big economic drivers, which had been absorbing tens of millions of people migrating from the countryside into the city, are not really driving that much employment anymore. So the shift that China has to make, and that economists and the Communist Party have known about for two decades, is the shift to consumption-led growth. Premier Wen Jiabao was talking about it in 2004, almost 20 years ago. If you look at progress since 2004, consumption as a share of GDP is still down.

Services already do absorb a majority of employment in China, more than in the secondary industries of manufacturing and construction. But the kinds of service sector jobs that are being created are pretty menial. And this is another really important feature when we think about how this shift is playing out. And when we think about the college grads.

But if jobs are shifting away from manufacturing and towards services—knowing that some of the service jobs are menial—it still seems like there should be more jobs for college graduates. Why are there no jobs for these folks?

One point that is important, and is often missed in a lot of the media coverage: Media coverage is very focused on the college grads. I understand why that is. As a college professor, I think about college grads a lot.

But the number that is always cited, the 21 percent unemployment figure, Is for all 16-to-24-year-olds. Within that, the proportion of people who are college grads is actually quite small. In China, you have nine years of compulsory education. In the ninth year—that’s age 14 or so—you take the high school entrance exam, and then you get tracked out. Some people go on to the academic high school route—and most of the people tracked into the academic high school route do get into university nowadays—but most people don’t make it onto that track. They either stop education after Year 9 or they go get some supplementary technical education.

So, if you’re looking at ages 16 to 24, it’s only the 23 and 24 year olds that could conceivably be university grads. Everyone else in that age group are people who’ve already left school and are looking for work.

I actually didn’t piece that together when I first saw those numbers last year. But then when it hit me, I was like, “This is much scarier than I thought.” If you think of youth unemployment as just college grads, then you lean into the discourse—which is not untrue, but it’s only a partial truth—that college grads don’t want to take jobs in manufacturing, or they don’t want to get a job as a factory worker or in a restaurant. But, actually, the majority of these people did not go to university, and they’re still not getting jobs. That’s the thing that really worries me. It’s not just people turning their noses up at jobs that they think don’t befit a college-educated person. It’s people who are just not getting jobs at all.

Talking about the university grads more specifically: People take jobs because they need enough money to live the life that they want to live. But the gap between the life that they want to live and the jobs that are available is incommensurable right now. You can think about that in a couple of ways.

For one, the kinds of service sector jobs that are overwhelmingly being produced just don’t pay you enough to live in the big cities where most college grads want to live. The income-to-housing ratio in large Chinese cities is among the worst in the world. It makes New York City look kind of affordable. So if you take the jobs that are available, then you’re not going to be able to buy a house. If you can’t buy a house, you won’t be able to get your kid into school. That is because employment in the formal sector and home ownership are often required to access [residence permits known as] hukou—without establishing hukou you can be denied access to a range of social services including public education, health care, and pensions.

Now, there are other kinds of jobs which might pay you enough to live that kind of life. But these jobs raise the whole “996” issue—working 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week. You might have enough money to buy a house, buy a car, and maybe to pay so someone else can raise your child. But I think a lot of young people are not into that anymore. That was really dramatized when all of the 996 activism was happening among tech workers two or three years ago. And, there’s a kind of generational difference. Back when [Alibab founder] Jack Ma was still making public appearances in China, he was kind of berating young people, very dismissive of them, when he said it’s a “blessing” to be able to do 996 when you’re in your 20s—this is what you do when you’re a young person, you devote your entire life to working hard and you can enjoy life later. That fell really flat with young people in China who didn’t grow up in desperate poverty in the way that people who were in their 50s or 60s did. This idea that you have to eat bitterness for decades before you can take a breather . . . if you grow up living middle class life in a big city in China, you’re thinking, “Maybe there’s more to life than just working all the time.”

So, the jobs that are being created right now are either not paying young people enough to live in the city, or they do pay enough but people then can’t live the kind of life that they would like to live. That’s part of the challenge for the college grad specifically.

If you’re the Chinese government, what are your range of options to deal with this? Or what might leaders be thinking about to try to engineer this economic shift? I assume they don’t have infinite time to make the shift, that there will eventually come an inflection point?

There’s not an endless amount of time. If they don’t make a serious intervention, the vitality of growth will gradually be sapped, because they can’t depend on exports. We already see a reorganization of global supply chains away from China. Supply chains are not leaving China by any means, but China is going to be less central to the production of all kinds of commodities in the next few years.

The debt piece is also really important to the extent that households and governments are using their money to service debt rather than making productive investments. That’s also going to undermine the vitality of growth.

So it will be a long, slow decline. If I were a betting person, I would put my money on that, because the other options—which have been known for a long time, which are actually pretty clear, and not all that controversial for economists—are very difficult politically. They’re very difficult because the system of growth for the last 30 years has created very rich and very politically-connected constituencies that don’t want to change.

Let’s think about real estate and exporters as key groups in all of this. With respect to exporters, if you want to shift from the current wage repression model to one predicated on a virtuous cycle of higher wages and higher consumption, you have to do two main things. One is you have to raise wages, obviously. One way to deal with this is to allow unions to bargain and collectively push up wages above what the market would determine on its own. The Chinese state is not willing to consider unions, because it thinks they pose a threat to political stability. Another option is that the state could just dictate. It could say, “In this industry, here’s what wages are going to be. We’re going to have dramatic increases in the minimum wage.” There were significant minimum wage hikes during the 2010s, but those increases have slowed considerably since Xi Jinping came to power. The state hasn’t done that. And so the question is, if there is already a dictatorial state, why can’t it just say, “Pay the workers more”? Because doing so would be a political problem. Whole economies are organized around exports; exporters and associated industries are very politically powerful. They have said, “We don’t want that,” and the Party has more or less gone along with it.

The other side Is social protections: Health care. Pensions are particularly important. Education. If you talk to Chinese people about why they’re not spending money, their biggest concerns are about the future.

For example, “How much is it going to cost for me to educate my child?” Officially, compulsory education is free in China, and that is in a sense true. Increasingly, buying a house in the catchment area of a good school has become a more expensive proposition in the biggest cities. This is something Americans can certainly relate to. You’re not formally paying tuition for schools, but you are in essence paying for schools via the real estate market.

On healthcare, the state has increased investments in health insurance, but it remains extremely patchy, particularly for migrant workers. The subsidies offered in rural areas are wildly inadequate. Hundreds of millions of people fear they are one major illness away from bankruptcy. There’s no national healthcare system, and there’s no indication that they are considering the sort of comprehensive national system such as exists in many countries.

Finally, pensions are really a big issue, and they’re very, very politically complicated. Because society is aging, there are more and more people of retirement age. (China has a pretty low retirement age, 60 for men and 55 For women, which they have considered raising.) The pension is a whole separate, complex issue. It is pretty uneven between rural people and urban people, between residents and migrants. Suffice it to say that for hundreds of millions of people, their pension is completely inadequate to live on. That’s why people are dependent on their children. But they only have one child. That child is paying the mortgage, but they can’t really support it.

So the answer to making this shift is raising wages and increasing social protections. The policy prescription is really not complicated. But how to do it politically is extremely complicated. Even a man as confident in himself as Xi Jinping would have a hard time doing it.

I think there’s also an ideological component to this. Based on what Xi and other leaders say, I think that they’re just a little bit neoliberal in this respect. Xi was very explicit. He was like, we don’t want to have excessively generous welfare policies to support lazy people. Despite the fact that it is a Communist Party, they just don’t see that as their job.

In terms of real estate, it needs to be a less central part of the economy. You have to have a property tax so local governments can generate revenue to support all the welfare programs that we have just talked about. But again, the real estate companies don’t want it. They’re extremely powerful. And lots of otherwise sympathetic middle class people also don’t want it because Chinese people have a huge percentage of their wealth invested in real estate. They don’t have the same kind of options around equities and mutual funds that people and other wealthy countries have. And so they sink all their money into real estate. And for a long time, that was a really good deal. But if they sunk all their money into a house, and then all of a sudden it’s being taxed at whatever percent a year, they might not have the income to pay that in addition to everything else they need. So it’s politically very difficult.

I don’t want to do too much mirror imaging here, but I have been struck several times by things you've said that seem to suggest similar vibes in China and in the U.S. For example, Jack Ma berating people for not working enough felt very Elon Musk-y to me. Or young people, either “lying flat” in China or “quiet quitting” here in the U.S. And then you just mentioned Xi’s admonition against welfare for lazy people, which really reminded me of Paul Ryan’s welfare “hammock.” It’s striking how similar these sentiments seem.

I think there are a lot of similarities. Since you mentioned Elon Musk, he’s actually tried to use the Chinese example to break his American employees, to get them to burn the midnight oil. The reality of what was going on at Shanghai Tesla was that workers were put in the closed loop in the Tesla factory during the Shanghai lockdown. They went in being told that they might be there for a few days, and they ended up there for [eight weeks]. So that’s the model that appeals to guys like Elon Musk and Jack Ma. And I can tell you for a fact that the Chinese workers who were in there were not doing it because they’re more morally upright or more committed to increasing the wealth of the world’s wealthiest man. They just didn’t have a choice. I think we should commend Tesla employees in the United States for refusing to do that.

Your broader point about the similarities—not just between the U.S. and China, but also between China and many other countries around the world—is really important because sometimes amidst all of the geopolitical strife, we imagine these two societies as fundamentally different. Actually, I think that a lot of the same global pressures are being brought to bear on both societies. A lot of the particulars are different: The expansion of higher education in China has been much more rapid; the social change and the generational difference in experience between people in their 60s versus people in their 20s is different for sure.

I teach at a university that has lots of young people from the United States and from China. I think that the broader question—about how people can make a decent life for themselves given the structural conditions—is something that’s troubling to people in both places, and that is unfortunate. I wish it were grounds for solidarity between young people of our two great nations.

I’m a bit hesitant to ask this question, because there is a tendency on this side of the world to frame everything in terms of, “Is this going to be the thing that brings down the CCP?” But a Bloomberg article earlier this month quoted a report from advisors to Xi’s which said that if they don’t get a handle on youth unemployment it could cause serious political problems. Do you think this is becoming a more salient issue for the government? What might the government do to mitigate the possibility of serious political problems or unrest, if it won’t alter the economic status quo?

First of all, I think it’s a totally legitimate question to ask. What are the potential political consequences of this structural condition? I don’t think it spells the end of the Communist Party and I think that we shouldn’t speculate about that too much. But we should think through what those potential political effects are.

As I’ve already said, after 1989, the central deal between the state and educated young people was that if they stay out of politics, they can expect regular material improvements in their lives. The Communist Party sees educated youth as one of their core constituencies that they really want to keep happy. Part of the reason for that is because of the Communist Party’s own history. They were founded by educated young people. Mao was working in the Peking University library. Deng Xiaoping had studied abroad in France. They’re keenly aware that dissatisfied educated young people can present a political challenge to the existing state. And so if that deal—political acquiescence in exchange for material improvement—is unraveling, then they’re going to have to find another way of handling this group of people.

The tools that they have at their disposal are different for college graduates than they are for lots of other people in Chinese society who are dissatisfied. The Chinese state spends a lot of time thinking about risks to political stability. When it comes to Uyghurs, they have one set of tools, for overwhelming repression—camps, surveillance, all of that. They can’t use those tools on college graduates, for a whole variety of reasons.

But there are other things they could do around the margins. They could certainly do something with respect to housing. A robust public housing program wouldn’t necessarily require a complete overhaul of the economy. They could keep some of that capacity around construction going and allow people to feel a little bit less anxious about making a life for themselves in the city. We’ve seen some housing programs here and there, but it continues to be very piecemeal. And overall, urban real estate continues to be very market-driven.

The liquidation of the entire private tutoring industry—which is targeting young people before they graduate college—is an acknowledgment of sorts that young people in Chinese society feel like they’re under too much pressure, and they don’t want them to be going to all of these hours of tutoring. There have been efforts to restrict the amount of homework that schools can assign and to turn the temperature down a little bit on testing. All of that is an indicator that they’re interested in doing something to address some of these issues.

Assuming that they’re not going to be able to enact deep structural reforms that would really resolve this problem, which I don’t think is very likely, the question then is, if there are a lot of people with grievances, what are the likely political consequences going to be?

And I think that the political consequences will probably not be very serious. What will probably happen is that lots of people will suffer from depression and anxiety, and that what is a fundamentally social problem will be put on the backs of individuals to bear by themselves.

Sounds familiar.

Yeah, that’s true most of the time. As an educator, I see it very clearly, in rising rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems among young people.

So I think that will largely be the extent of it. The avenues for political expression are pretty limited. You can’t join a political party, you can’t join a union, and you can’t form your own organization. There are online communities that pop up here and there, but if they get too big, they get censored and reined in. The state doesn’t have to use the kind of repression that they use against Uyghurs or Tibetans. They can use a more delicate form of oppression.

But in terms of political consciousness, I do think that there has been a significant shift among highly educated youth in China. I’ve seen this among my students here, and I’ve definitely seen it in the writing that students back in China are doing.

The clearest example of this was during the White Paper movement. The protests were not representative of youth in general; the total number of people who were actually out on the streets shouting, “Down with Xi Jinping!” was pretty small. So who’s to say what the majority of people are thinking. But the fact that it was even possible. . . I mean, saying “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the Communist Party” in public was unthinkable in October 2022, and in November 2022, it was happening all over the place, including here at Cornell, and in many places around the world.

During private conversations with many people, I’ve seen folks who were previously quite patriotic and pro-government say, “Wow, if the government can just lock me in my apartment in Shanghai for months—me, a relatively privileged, well-educated person—what else could they do to me?” Also, the things the government has promised about a better life—trust the Communist Party and your livelihoods will improve—that’s not really panning out anymore. That has effected a change. Whether that actually eventually translates into action is another question. But it is now another problem for the state to manage, in a way that they haven’t had to manage, coming from what had been a pretty solid base of support for them for a few decades. The Tibetans, the Uyghurs, and Hong Kong were always troublesome for them. But here in the core, in Beijing, in Shanghai, and in the big cities, they have this other concern and so they’ll have to pay more attention to it.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile.

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In a recent working paper, scholars Yutian An and Taisu Zhang argue that local urban governments in China emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with far more muscle and clout than they have ever had before. Unlike in the past several decades, the sub-district (jiedao, 街道, the lowest formal level of government) and the neighborhood community (shequ, 社区, technically self-governing entities below even the sub-district) now function as robust units of social control.

Though the central government had long considered—and vacillated over—giving more authority to the jiedao and shequ, the onset of the pandemic definitively tipped the balance in favor of providing these entities with greater resources and allowing them to act with more agency. This shift means that the Party-state is more present in people’s everyday lives, able to both provide services and conduct surveillance at a highly granular level.

Taisu Zhang recently spoke with ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke about this momentous change in how the Party-state interacts with its citizens. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Jessica Batke: The thesis of your working paper is that the Chinese government’s reach into urban citizens’ lives expanded drastically over the course of the pandemic. The main way this happened is that the central government dictated that districts, which sit just below municipal governments in the administrative hierarchy, delegate many of their tasks and responsibilities down to the lowest levels of government, the jiedao and the shequ. But what were the jiedao and shequ empowered to do before COVID?

Taisu Zhang: The paper’s thesis is that COVID was, we think, a qualitative change, but also that there was quite a bit of buildup to COVID. Without the buildup, COVID likely would not have had this big an effect on the way local governments actually operate.

Prior to 2010, the Chinese government’s reach into local affairs was not terribly expansive. In urban centers, everything substantial was operating at the district level. And especially all of the rule enforcement [entities], including the chengguan [the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, a sort of supplemental, unarmed police force in urban areas, charged with keeping order on the streets], were operating at the district level as their main command center. They had a presence below the district level, but that presence reported up to district-level authorities.

Right around the time that the current regime came into place [in 2012 and 2013], it began exploring ways to “descend” the overall power and influence of the government further, especially in urban centers. It began thinking, “Can we give more direct law enforcement powers to sub-districts?” And this became a common theme in top-down directives and policies over the next couple of years.

But we would also argue that actual implementation on the ground was pretty uneven. And there was a visible hesitation to do this too fully. The government had a vision of going all the way down, but it had resource constraints. Not all city governments and district governments were terribly happy to do it either, because then they would lose some of their own power.

If the central government had wanted more of this “descent” to happen, what else had been preventing it?

There are various layers of principal-agent problems [whereby a lower-level power, or agent, can take action on behalf of a higher-level power, or principal—sometimes not to the principal’s liking]. The most direct one is, if you begin delegating powers to sub-districts in this more robust fashion, districts and cities are going to have a harder time managing their agents on the ground, and they’re going to have to be more comfortable with more discretion being wielded at a lower level. And it was not clear that all city governments liked that; some of them quite visibly didn’t want to invest too much in doing so.

At the central level, they too have a control and monitoring problem. This is true of every single central government in Chinese history. They always have an uneasy relationship with their agents on the ground, because they’re always worried that the agents are going to abuse their powers, or be corrupt and cause problems that are going to come back to the center at some point. So they want control and monitoring over local agents. But the further you descend, obviously, the monitoring problems go exponential. If you go from district to sub-district, the overall costs of monitoring might triple or quadruple.

This meant that prior to COVID, even though this kind of law enforcement delegation to sub-districts was constantly being discussed, or partially in progress, or in extra experimentation in some localities, there was also always a visible hesitancy—not just on the behalf of some city governments, but also even on behalf of the center—of how far they wanted to actually push it.

The second part of the narrative is what to do with shequ, the neighborhood communities, which are the absolute lowest level of governmental presence. Basically everyone has encountered these entities. If you live in any kind of neighborhood compound in any major city, there’s going to be a shequ in there somewhere. When I was a kid, you ordered milk delivery from the shequ, and that was basically it. It seemed to have no other substantial powers, except they might be responsible for helping you repair a faulty power line or something like that.

Part of the reason for that kind of functional ambiguity is that the shequ are defined nominally in the law as local self-governance entities. So in theory, they shouldn’t be used as units of government administration. In practice, of course, that was never true. The government always knew that it had the capacity to tap the shequ if it really needed to. But prior to 2011 or so, first of all, there wasn’t much top-down demand for doing so. And second, if you think the principal-agent problem is bad at the sub-district level, then going all the way down to the neighborhood communities makes it 10 times worse.

I’m thinking of different ways to describe what the shequ were doing before the COVID-related changes took place. And the way you talk about it makes it kind of sound like 311 in New York, which you call if your garbage didn’t get picked up or something.

I think that describes most neighborhood communities. That said, in places that have a record of social unrest or local activism, like homeowner activism, it’s not hard to imagine that a higher-level state apparatus would tell the local shequ they needed to be on the watch and report back, and so on. But even then, the shequ isn’t supposed to enforce any rules, but mostly just report certain things upward. I think even that reporting function was pretty marginal in most places up until about the mid-2010s. Up until the mid-2010s, every single shequ I had ever encountered in Beijing was staffed by retirees who were 65 years old or older. And if you want to use shequ as really robust monitoring entities, that’s not the way to go.

Then around 2015, that began to transform as well. There was more talk in central-level policy documents about this thing called wanggehuaguanli (网格化管理, grid-like management), which envisioned using these neighborhood communities more as public security and social control nodes. There began to be talk of giving them more expansive monitoring powers, having them assist in law enforcement, and so on and so forth.

Is there a reason why this started happening around 2015?

Well, they had talked about it, and even experimented with it in various places from 2010 onwards. The first mention that we found actually goes all the way back to 2007. So it was a slow trickle; we’re talking about a top-down, centralized bureaucratic state here. They always wanted more information-gathering at the local level, but, given the level of staffing, and given the legal embarrassment of using these things too aggressively, and given the massive escalation problems they would have to incur if they really began to power the shequ, they never took that plunge.

But around 2010, that began to change. I think it’s mainly because this current regime is much more about overarching systemic control than the previous ones. Also, perhaps it’s their general insistence on stronger, more uniform, more systemic law enforcement. So we have a lot of things going on at the same time. But in terms of actual investments, whether they were going to send down the material resources—either money, personnel, or equipment—to actually make shequ somewhat powerful, or even whether there was a consistent rhetorical commitment to expanding the role of shequ in central policy documents, it really wasn’t all that clear.

There were stronger signals sent in 2015. And then somehow, in 2017 and 2019, in some of the central policy documents, the language weakens a little bit on how much they want to empower the shequ. Clearly, this has all been envisioned, and had been experimented with in various places, but a full-blown decisive commitment to this vision was still not completely there prior to 2020.

So then we get COVID. And with COVID, everything just fundamentally changes almost overnight. Within a year of COVID, there has been full-blown delegation to sub-districts as full law enforcement entities. They’re getting command powers over law enforcement personnel and over chengguan, especially at the jiedao level.

And then, at the neighborhood organization level . . . this is what everyone was really experiencing during the lockdowns in China. The shequ became completely activated as a unit of control. They gained coercive power. They were charged with enforcing rules and enforcing lockdowns. They were charged with enforcing health codes wherever you entered. So these guys go from being pretty invisible 10 years ago to now being the way in which you encounter governmental authority on a day-to-day basis.

Some of my friends and I have been arguing about how gradual this change was. Some of them think that I’m overselling how dramatic it was, that the buildup was more gradual than I’m allowing. Others actually think the opposite, that I’m underselling the functional change. So there’s not a ton of agreement, partially because there hasn’t been a ton of attention paid to this yet.

I thought your swim gear analogy was really helpful in thinking about this. You and your co-author write, “Imagine a person who changes into swim gear, walks up to a river, and then hesitates over whether to actually jump in. A strong gust of wind knocks him into the river, and he swims across. Without the gust of wind, there was at least a substantial chance he would not have jumped in at all, but without the preparations beforehand, he almost certainly would have climbed back onshore after being knocked in, instead of swimming across.” This analogy doesn’t resolve the question of how drastic or gradual the change was, but it helps underscore the necessity of the pre-COVID preparation in making the change possible.

I talked with urban governance scholars, and other urban planning scholars, and a couple of legal scholars, and the one thing that everyone realized was that if it hadn’t been for the preparation before COVID, COVID would have likely had the same effect as . . . you must remember SARS, right?

Yes, of course.

So SARS didn’t have any lasting impact, I think, on the way that local administration runs in China—not in any kind of institutionally permanent way or in any observable fashion. Without any preparation, COVID might have looked a lot more like SARS [from a governance standpoint]. Which also means that we might have had less zero-COVID, and not for as long. I do think that the government’s full-blown commitment to this for three years was on the back of quite a bit of preparation. They didn’t know they were preparing for COVID, but without that slow institutional buildup, they wouldn’t have been able to make use of COVID in the way that they did.

{quote, 2}

Looking at local governance in China right now, compared to, let’s say, 2011—in the final years of the previous regime—I think no one can deny that the difference is really dramatic. The feeling of how close the state is to you has just fundamentally changed.

Back in 2010, I was still running around trying to do ethnographic research there. And I don’t know if people even remember this now that China’s become a big state regime, but back then, especially in like 2008, 2009, the complaint was that the state wasn’t aggressive enough. There was just no rule enforcement in all kinds of localities. There was randomness, there was lack of uniformity. In a lot of places, public order was pretty poor. Public security was pretty poor. You couldn’t count on the police to actually do anything. So back then, a lot of the complaints were that China just didn’t have much of a local rule enforcement apparatus. Everything was ad hoc at the local level.

And now everything is formalized and institutionalized. I took a trip to China in 2019 and then in summer 2022, and it just hit me in the face last summer how big the change was. Previously, I hadn’t even known where my neighborhood committee was. I didn’t know who was staffing it. If I needed any kind of documents, or new licenses, or anything, I went to district-level offices. The only business I ever had with my sub-district office, sub-district government, was getting my personal ID renewed, and that was a long time ago. These were not entities in your everyday life. And all of a sudden, you’re dealing with them all the time.

You say in the paper that the zero-COVID level of daily surveillance and monitoring isn’t going to continue on in the same way it has been (though the government can ramp back up at any time they choose to). But you also seem to think that these new local government powers are not going to be rescinded. Why is it likely that the jiedao and shequ will retain their new social control functions?

On the most facial, shallowest level, these powers are created by documents that are not limited to the COVID context. Throughout our paper, we distinguish between documents that speak directly to the COVID context and documents that speak a more generalized language. And all these things [we’ve been talking about], from the descent of law enforcement down to sub-districts, to the activation of shequ, these are in general documents. They’re meant to be durable at least until they’re overturned. They don’t just automatically run out with the end of zero-COVID. They’re not tied to COVID in any shape or form. COVID makes no appearance in any of these documents. Clearly, for right now at least, the plan is to keep these policies in place.

Politically, the basic fact of the matter is that the Party-state’s relationship with the population got quite strained at the end of last year. The tensions were higher than they had been for quite some time, and on a much larger scale. So if you’re wondering, “What is a good time to give up my monitoring powers?” This is not the time. Unless China somehow enters a surprise period of great economic prosperity, I doubt the government is going to feel comfortable enough to take its foot permanently off the gas.

And you think that’s true despite the cost, right? Not only the cost of staffing and supplies at the local level, but also the cost to the higher levels of government to train and monitor the lower levels and make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. That sounds really, really expensive. And it sounds like you think they’re willing to keep making that investment.

I think they have to at this point. Because again, if they take their foot off the gas right now they’re running the risk of losing information access to an urban population that is probably quite a bit unhappier at the moment than what it has been for some time. So they can’t risk it.

{quote, 3}

Of course, what makes this super awkward is exactly as you said—that this is such a huge cost. For every dollar you spend directly injecting capacity into local governments, you have to spend at least another dollar, or possibly two, at the higher level, monitoring that dollar on the ground. Your costs are always doubled or tripled, and if you’re going right down to the neighborhood level . . . how many neighborhood organizations are there in China? The precise number is something like two million. The cost is just astronomical. And it’s also happening at the same time that local government finances are in a tighter crunch than they’ve been in recent decades. You’re escalating administrative costs at the same time that you’re going into a fiscal crunch.

So it has to be very uncomfortable. But I also think that there’s an overall sense of vulnerability, a sense that things are not going terribly swimmingly at the moment, which will strengthen the government’s resolve to go down to local levels. You might call it a vicious cycle, where the tenser the situation is, the more you want to monitor, but at the same time, the more you monitor, the more you can see how tense it is. It escalates.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile.

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Gulchehra Hoja is a longtime broadcaster with Radio Free Asia’s (RFA) Uyghur Service. She grew up in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and was a successful TV personality and journalist with Chinese state media there. She later left China to join RFA and provide uncensored news coverage from the United States. ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke recently with Hoja about her new memoir, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs. The book describes Hoja’s upbringing in a rapidly changing society and political environment, her work as a TV host in China, her decision to leave her homeland, reporting on the ongoing crisis there, and the process of building a new life in a foreign country. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Jessica Batke: In some ways, your story is a remarkable one: you come from a long line of cultural luminaries. But in other ways, your story is unfortunately typical for a Uyghur living abroad: you are separated from your loved ones, who are undergoing persecution and oppression back in your homeland. Your book opens with a horrible statistic: 24 members of your family were taken away by the state. Do you have a sense of how common that kind of mass detention within a single family is?

Gulchehra Hoja: I am not the only secondary victim of this genocide. We live in another country, and starting in 2016, [all of us] lost contact with our family members back home. Not only me, but all of us. We didn’t know anything about our family for a year, or two years. Even right now, many Uyghurs still don’t know where their loved ones are. Their homes were destroyed. Phone calls cannot go through. You cannot find your relatives, or your neighbors, or your friends. There’s nobody there. So I am just one example.

I was able to learn the news about my family because the Chinese government intentionally wanted me to know and wanted to silence me by using this information to damage me. I think this is the way they want to give journalists a signal: If you don’t stay quiet, your family is going to be in trouble. So it’s not only me. It’s very common, the devastation we’re facing.

A few of my coworkers didn’t know what had happened to their families. And then some of them used their contacts with embassies to learn from the Chinese government, four or five years after the fact, that all their family members had been sentenced to 10 or more years because [their relatives] live in a free country. Even if [these relatives abroad] hadn’t said anything against the Chinese government’s policy.

It’s unimaginable for people living in a free country. But for the Uyghurs, that’s the situation for all of us.

It seems like Chinese authorities are especially targeting anyone they think is good at communicating and getting information out.

Yes, you can say I am a special target. Because they didn’t stop after they arrested my family members. In 2021, they accused me openly, saying I’m a terrorist. So they’re still using these kinds of tools and tactics to try and keep us silent. I don’t know what could happen to me or to my family. What can they do? I don’t know.

But I want to let them know: We will die proudly. We aren’t afraid of dying. We aren’t. We’re afraid of losing our freedom and our hope and our dignity. We don’t give up. This is all we have right now.

I wrote the book specifically for this reason. I just want to say to the world: We are not merely victims. We are so much more than that. We are beautiful people, just like you. Because we are different from the Chinese people, because we don’t obey the Chinese government—that’s why they want to destroy us.

In the book, you, and everyone around you, lived in this constant state of choosing, because anything that you did or said could be interpreted as political. Even if you didn’t mean it to be political, even if you just wanted to speak your language, or dance, it could be seen as political.

We were very careful, very careful. Even at home, we were raised with warnings from our parents: “Don’t say these kinds of things in school, don’t say those kinds of things when you’re playing with Han Chinese kids.”

Hearing that all the time reminded us we were different. And we were constantly facing discrimination in school, and society, and the workplace. We all knew it was because we were Uyghurs that we were facing that kind of pressure. So it was actually training you to be smarter in choosing your words, in communicating with people, in choosing what kind of people you should communicate with.

This is actually almost exactly what my next question was about. I feel like in the book you hinted at this sort of duality, in what you knew and how you were allowed to exist. For example, you wrote about the knowledge that you could get from history books, but also a whole other set of knowledge that could only be acquired “in private settings and in low voices.”

That’s why one of my professors in the university said, “Do you know how lucky you are?” I said, “Why?” He said, “You just can learn things sitting at the dining table that a lot of other people cannot learn even in university or reading a book. You are just so lucky because you are your father’s daughter, Abdulqeyyum Hoja’s daughter.” [Abdulqeyyum Hoja was a prominent archaeologist focused on the history of the Uyghur region.] Because I was young, I didn’t really understand it. After I grew up and this stuff was happening to us, then I realized . . . all this memory, you know, it comes back to you. So I was so fortunate, a fortunate girl.

How much do you think the knowledge from your father contributed to your decision, when you did finally go abroad, to stay abroad? Because that seems like such an extraordinary decision to make, leaving behind your family and your career. Do you think it’s because you had knowledge that other people didn’t have?

I dedicated this book to my beloved father, Abdulqeyyum Hoja, who taught me how to love myself, love my people, love my country, and human beings, and dignity, and freedom. So, the hardest part of my life was two decades of time during which I was forbidden to see my father. Conversely, this separation also trained me. It taught me that the love of human beings is unstoppable, regardless of time and space, and that such a misfortune would tighten the bonds of missing hearts.

My father used to tell me that even a stone is precious in the place where it drops. That’s the name of my book as well, “Tash chüshkän yeridä äziz.” We said that all the time. I lived through the deep values of this proverb, which is often used among Uyghurs who are separated from their birthplace.

When I was in the Uyghur region with my father, I always asked his advice when I had to make a decision. And I strongly believe that afterwards, when I was alone, he was inside of me. It wasn’t only me anymore. It was about my father, about my grandpa. The power coming from what they taught me, that’s why making those decisions was not that hard for me. Actually, it was like a cage opened for me. I was flying, carrying their hope. This is not my decision. I feel that they wanted me to make this decision. The cage opened suddenly, just for me. They stayed for other people, for their people, for the land.

You know, all Uyghurs have only one wish: that when they die, they are buried in their birth place. It’s a huge thing. Maybe I still have that hope. But if there’s no chance for me to go back, at least I have the stone from my dad [a rock from his yard he managed to send to her in the U.S.]. I will write to my kids to ask them to bury me with the stone so that I will be with part of my country, my land. This stone is most precious. It is there in my bookcase. I can show you.

Please.

[Hoja retrieves the stone and holds it up.]

This is very special. It smells like home. I don’t know why, but it really smells like home. You know, like after rain touches the soil. It’s the fragrance I love the most. I wish someone could create this fragrance! It’s the most delicious smell in the world. I feel that it heals your soul. How my father found this and sent it to me is magic. And it actually gave me the inspiration to write this book. Yep, this is my treasure. Priceless.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile.

—

Over the last few years, the Chinese Communist Party has physically remade places of religious worship in western China to its liking. This includes not only the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but also other areas with mosques or Tibetan Buddhist temples and monasteries. Eight Chinese government procurement notices, issued between 2018 and 2021, show local officials seeking to sinify religious sites in Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan provinces, as well as in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

In most cases, the notices cite the “four entrances” policy, which seeks to bring “the national flag, the constitution as well as laws and regulations, core socialist values, and China’s excellent traditional culture” into religious sites. Accordingly, several of the local government purchasers sought flags and 12-meter-high flagpoles for mosques or temples. One notice from a county in Ningxia listed the books authorities hoped to “enter” into “religious activity sites,” including Xi Jinping Talks about Governing the Country and An Explanation of Religious Affairs Regulations, among others.

In one instance, a town government in Sichuan province wanted to architecturally alter the local mosque. The procurement notice calls for purging “sanhua” (三化), or “the three -izations,” referring to “Saudi-ization,” “Arab-ization,” and “halal-ization.” Given government-imposed architectural changes elsewhere in the country, this likely means that the town wished to remove domes, minarets, or any other such features deemed insufficiently “Chinese.”

Below are the details of the relevant procurement notices, as translated by ChinaFile:

Launching the “Four Entrances in Religious Activity Sites” Activity to Procure and Install Promotional Window Display Boards (开展“四进宗教活动场所”活动宣传橱窗展板采购及安装)

• Location: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Wuzhong City, Tongxin County
• Purchaser: Tongxin County Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau
• Year: 2018
• Final Purchase Amount: 1,072,184 renminbi

“Four Entrances Activity” Procurement (“四进活动”采购)

• Location: Gansu Province, Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Linxia City
• Purchaser: Linxia City Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau
• Year: 2018
• Final Purchase Amount: 1,103,500 renminbi
• The tender included 70 12-meter-high flagpoles, 10 9-meter-high flagpoles, 80 flagpole platforms, and 80 flags.

The Second “Four Entrances Activity” Procurement (第二批“四进活动”采购)

• Location: Gansu Province, Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Linxia City
• Purchaser: Linxia City Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau
• Year: 2019
• Final Purchase Amount: 1,108,000 renminbi
• The tender included 80 12-meter-high flagpoles, 80 flagpole platforms, and 80 flags.

Maqu County Religious Sites “Four Entrances” Activity, Constructing Flagpole Platforms in 11 Monasteries (玛曲县宗教场所“四进”活动，11座寺院修建国旗台)

• Location: Gansu Province, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Maqu County
• Purchaser: Maqu County United Front Work Department
• Year: 2019
• Final Purchase Amount: 434,115 renminbi
• The tender included 11 9-to-12-meter-high flagpoles and flagpole platforms.

Guinan County Tibetan Buddhist Monastery “The National Flag Enters the Temple” Construction (贵南县藏传佛教寺院“国旗进寺院”建设)

• Location: Qinghai Province, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Guinan County
• Purchaser: Guinan County Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau
• Year: 2019
• Final Purchase Amount: 620,362 renminbi

Pengyang County “Four Entrances” Religious Activity Sites Book Procurement (彭阳县“四进”宗教活动场所图书采购)

• Location: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Guyuan City, Pengyang County
• Purchaser: Pengyang County Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau
• Year: 2019
• Final Purchase Amount: 625,552 renminbi
• The tender included 130 different books, purchased in quantities of 126 each. The full list of books comes from a previous iteration of this procurement notice, which was tendered and canceled twice for technical reasons before finally being awarded out in 2019.

National Flag Entering Religious Activity Sites Activity National Flag Flagpole and Installation Procurement (国旗进宗教场所活动国旗旗杆及安装采购)

• Location: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Wuzhong City, Tongxin County
• Purchaser: Tongxin County United Front Work Department
• Year: 2020
• Final Purchase Amount: 4,698,759 renminbi
• The tender included a list of 225 religious sites, many of them explicitly mosques, where flagpoles were to be installed. The tender was ultimately canceled in mid-2021 because the bidding process hadn’t been conducted according to standard procedures, thereby “affecting the fairness of the bidding process.”

Project to Remove Sanhua Style from the Qingchuan County, Qingxi Township Mosque (青川县青溪镇清真寺去三化风貌工程)

• Location: Sichuan Province, Qingchuan County, Qingxi Township
• Purchaser: Qingchuan County, Qingxi Township People’s Government
• Year: 2021
• Initial Tender Amount: 423,416 renminbi
• Though local authorities posted an initial announcement and modification announcement for this tender, ChinaFile has been unable to locate a final announcement verifying the purchase was actually completed.

On November 1, Turkel spoke with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke.

Video available on ChinaFile.

This article originally appeared on ChinaFile.

—

In 2018, a local government office in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing set out to gauge the local population’s satisfaction with their place of residence. Chongqing’s Yongchuan District Statistics Bureau would field what it termed a “social conditions public opinion survey,” with questions tailored to both the district’s urban and rural residents.

From the city-dwellers, the survey would solicit thoughts on the area’s environmental situation.

Question one: “How clean is the city or town you live in?”

Question five: “How good is the air quality in the place where you live?”

Rural residents would be asked to opine on their access to water and the condition of public roads.

Queries put to both groups, “Do you think your local cadres are still living extravagant lifestyles?” and “Do you think the cadres around you have handled their work according to the law?” prompted them to question what, in China, is often treated as unquestionable.

In recent years, both Chinese state and Communist Party (CCP) organizations have fielded thousands such public opinion polls, on subjects ranging from hospital services, to rural revitalization, to food safety. Yet, much of the information gleaned from these surveys remains inaccessible to anyone else. And, since the mid-2010s, non-governmental entities, particularly foreign ones, have found it increasingly difficult to conduct their own surveys in China. Several new regulatory measures, as well as a tightening political environment, make it harder than ever for foreign universities and researchers to field randomized, representative public opinion surveys. Though researchers do conduct online, opt-in polls, this method reduces their ability to create representative samples and therefore to accurately reflect public opinion across China more broadly.

Domestic institutions such as universities also face hurdles when polling the public. They must keep their survey questions politically kosher, and they have less and less ability to work with counterparts abroad. Though pollsters both foreign and domestic have long had to avoid questions China’s leaders deem “sensitive,” the current situation often prevents them from asking any questions at all.

In this way, China’s state-sponsored public opinion polls typify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s model of governance, in which Beijing exercises ever-greater levels of control over the production and dissemination of knowledge. From curbs on foreign press, to tightening controls over social media, to laws that limit all but the Party-state’s access to citizen data, Xi’s administration clearly takes seriously the notion that “whoever controls information and the network owns the whole world.” Beijing has always restricted information flows, but previously common exchanges between scholars, citizens, journalists, and pollsters have dwindled in recent years. The outside world has less and less insight into the views of average Chinese people—a population that makes up one fifth of humanity. The Chinese government, on the other hand, works to stay well-informed of the public’s thoughts.

Media reporting in recent decades has noted the government’s interest in polling its citizens, but details about those polls are often sparse. While some offices release the results of their surveys—like those from a 2020 citizen satisfaction poll conducted by the Gansu Justice Department—many more are never made public. As the Beijing Municipal Statistics Bureau noted in a description of its 2021 “Beijing Smart City and Digital Life Public Opinion Survey,” “survey data is for internal use and for statistical purposes only, and is not for public release.”

Now, a collection of Chinese government procurement notices, posted to the Chinese Government Procurement Network website between 2016 and early 2022, offers a more detailed look at the public opinion polls central and local government offices around China are commissioning. A review of some 1,400 of these notices highlights Beijing’s preoccupation with popular threats to the Party’s rule. The poll topics, and the individual poll questions included in a handful of notices, show how China’s unelected leaders seek performance reviews from their fellow citizens—whether or not those reviews are heeded.

A wide range of Party and state entities commission public opinion polls. The Ministry of Public Security (MPS), for example, contracted out an anti-drug survey in late 2021. More than 200,000 residents throughout the country received a telephone call asking them what they thought about their government’s anti-drug efforts. Based on the procurement notice they issued, the MPS had pollsters pose the following questions:

“Overall, are you satisfied with the anti-drug work your local authorities are carrying out?”

“If you discover illegal or criminal drug-related behaviors, would you report them to public security authorities?”

“Which of the following statements about drug use do you agree with?

1. Using drugs is illegal in our country
2. Drug users are victims
3. Using drugs harms one’s health
4. Just trying a drug doesn’t mean one will become addicted to it
5. New types of drugs are confusing, and it’s hard to tell them apart.”

In recent years, central and local offices representing justice, cultural, health, market regulation, science, education, and propaganda interests, among many others, have sought contractors to run their polls.

Throughout the country, the “masses’ sense of security” appears to be a perennial concern of local public security bureaus as well as their Party overseers, Politics and Law Commissions. Some version of a “sense of security” poll, sometimes combined with related topics such as “satisfaction with law and order” or “clearing out the underworld,” appear repeatedly in procurement notices from the last decade. It is no surprise that the CCP would be sensitive to whether or not citizens feel safe; the Party’s ability to provide a minimum level of economic and physical security forms the bedrock of its legitimacy. These polls can extend beyond simple measures of safety, however, to include evaluations of policing and criminal justice generally. In a 2014 “whole-province survey on the masses’ sense of security and degree of satisfaction with politics and law work,” the Guangdong Province Politics and Law Commission wanted respondents to rate the work of public security, the procuratorate, and the courts on a scale of one (“unsatisfied”) to five (“satisfied”).

“They’re collecting data from civilians and treating them more like citizens,” says Suzanne Scoggins, an associate professor at Clark University who researches policing and state legitimacy in reform-era China. “And they do care what people think. It’s about prevention and control, before they actually have to deploy law enforcement.”

A review of the topics and questions from public opinion surveys, as revealed in procurement notices, shows authorities trying to gauge popular sentiment as well as evaluate the effectiveness of certain policies or bureaucracies. Early this year, the Daxing district propaganda bureau in Beijing hoped to field a household survey to assess its efforts to “create a civilized urban area.” In 2021, Sichuan province’s Mianyang city wanted to know what residents, including both rights holders and the general public, thought about how it regulated intellectual property (“How transparent do you think our city’s intellectual property protection administrative enforcement and criminal justice is?” “How do you think our city’s intellectual property protection management services are compared to last year?”). Also in 2021, the Municipal Education Commission of Shanghai sought to survey recent college graduates about their job satisfaction, to feed into its higher education classification and evaluation index.

Though poll questions may have become more specialized over time, China’s leaders have shown a general interest in public opinion polling for more than four decades. In the 1980s, Beijing was particularly concerned about citizens’ thoughts on social and economic reforms. Indeed, pollster Yang Guansan, working for a government-affiliated think tank, warned leaders in an internal report published just before the Tiananmen Square tragedy in 1989 that the public discontent revealed in his surveys presaged social turmoil. Old political habits die hard: the government would later jail Yang for allegedly inciting the protests.

But Tiananman proved only a speed bump in the development of public opinion surveys in China. By the mid-1990s, all manner of institutions were conducting polls—even as those polls avoided politically risky topics—including commercial firms and academic institutions, as well as government and government-affiliated offices. Since 2004, the National Bureau of Statistics and its local-level equivalents have regularly conducted public opinion surveys; by 2009, 25 provinces had established their own “Social Conditions Public Opinion Survey Centers,” asking the same types of questions that the Chongqing government put to its residents in 2018. Indeed, in the late aughts, government officials suggested that such surveys would help guide policymaking, and at least a few localities incorporated public opinion polling results into their cadre evaluation systems. More recently, in January 2022, the national Statistics Bureau approved the establishment of “ecology and environment mass satisfaction survey systems” in Hainan, Yunnan, Hebei, and Jiangxi provinces, hinting at the ways in which local governments are regularizing the use of specific, topical surveys.

And yet, despite the proliferation of both public and private polling services, the space to conduct independent polls has narrowed. Foreign researchers who had previously worked with domestic Chinese partners, including both universities and private companies, to conduct public opinion polls in the mainland have found it increasingly difficult in the last five years.

“The idea that you can buy a service and write a check for a company to ask questions that are not purely about toothpaste and soap? That is not happening anymore,” says Pierre Landry, an expert on Chinese politics and survey research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. George Washington University’s Bruce Dickson, who researches popular support for the Chinese government, agrees. “Post-Xi, everything became more difficult with field research.”

2021’s Data Security Law, which restricts where data collected from Chinese citizens can be stored, as well as enhanced oversight of financial transfers, implemented after domestic stock market turbulence in 2015 and 2016, have both affected foreign researchers’ ability to field public opinion surveys or access the results, say scholars and experts who have worked in the field. 2017 regulations for implementing the national Statistics Law also include specific provisions for any foreign entities seeking to “carry out any statistical survey within the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Even domestic pollsters, who have a relatively freer hand, must still coordinate with authorities to ensure they stay within ever-changing political redlines.

Despite the state’s monopoly on politically-charged survey questions, commercial Chinese firms are intimately involved in government public opinion polling. Government offices award a fair number of polling contracts to state-run statistics bureaus, but corporate firms also survey citizens on behalf of local authorities. For its 2018 “social conditions public opinion survey,” the Yongchuan District Statistics Bureau awarded the bid to the local company Listen (Chongqing) Marketing Research. Dataway Horizon, a firm well-known under its previous moniker of Horizon Research Consultancy Group as a key partner for both Chinese government clients as well as foreign researchers, has won hundreds of government survey tenders in the last five years.

Though they offer a window into the Party-state’s governance concerns, procurement notices cannot reveal how public opinion polling results are actually deployed in internal policy debates, leadership decision-making, or the promotion of local officials. The hopeful rhetoric in the late 2000s, that suggested such polling results would be rigorously incorporated into local governance processes, has not materialized into concrete standards 15 years on. Reviewing 99 local government public opinion surveys conducted between 2011 and 2014, a researcher at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences found that the vast majority of surveys asking about specific policies had actually been fielded after the relevant policies had already been formulated or implemented. The “Regulations on the Assessment of Leading Cadres in the Party and Government,” issued by the CCP’s General Office in 2019, say only that cadre assessments should not “simply be determined by regional GDP or growth rankings, or by scores from democratic evaluations or opinion polls.” But the regulations do not say how public opinion polls could or should be used instead. The CCP Organization Department’s 2020 “Notice on Improving Performance Appraisals to Promote High-Quality Development” does say that cadre evaluations should “make good use of ‘positive and negative reviews’ of government services, the public ecology and environment satisfaction survey, and the basic public services satisfaction survey”; it does not specify what “good use” entails or how many points a cadre might be docked if the public expressed dissatisfaction on these surveys.

In some ways, this is not surprising. Authoritarian governments have an inherent disincentive to codify public opinion as a mechanism of accountability. “If they do incorporate the polling formally into cadre evaluations, it’s like them saying, ‘We acknowledge the importance of bottom-up, semi-democratic measures,’” says Ning Leng, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who focuses on the unintended consequences of nondemocratic institutions in China. “That’s not going to happen.”

Beijing also has well-founded concerns about the reliability of data local officials feed up to it. The 2014 Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences study argued that government-run polls lacked credibility: “Presently, some local governments and departments have impure motivations for using public opinion polling,” the study’s author wrote. “For political gain, they conduct polls that they plan and execute themselves, and that deceive their superiors and dupe their subordinates.” Procurement notices suggest that this phenomenon may still occur. In the multiple-choice questionnaire for Chongqing’s “social conditions public opinion survey,” most questions offered respondents two “positive” response options (for example, “Good” and “Relatively good”) but only one “negative” response option (“Not good”). Such framing skews poll results in a direction beneficial for the government requesting them.

And yet, even if Beijing’s own governance structures prevent it from accurately collecting or meaningfully using public opinion data, its desire for this data—and its desire to convert this data into popular legitimacy—cannot be wholly dismissed. Beijing still has a very real interest in keeping enough people satisfied enough that they continue to accept CCP rule. In late 2021, the Changping district government in Beijing specifically wanted to conduct a survey in order to

“understand the satisfaction of all government services recipients, all residents, and all enterprises regarding the Changping district government’s improvement of people’s livelihoods and optimization of service management, . . . incorporate the satisfaction score into the district’s annual government evaluation results, and inform government departments and localities of the problems the public reported so they can rectify their performance, . . . continue to enhance the government’s credibility and execution, and continuously strengthen the people’s sense of identification [with the nation] and sense of having benefited.”

Procurement notices show that at least some of the government’s public opinion surveys demand polling methodologies commensurate with the gravity of the undertaking. While some tenders do include opt-in online polling as the partial or primary mode of surveying, others specifically request telephone or in-person surveys—a method which allows for more rigorous sampling techniques and helps ensure the survey results will be more representative of the population as a whole. Such specifications reflect a level of sophistication in the entities commissioning the surveys, suggesting they are seeking high-quality data broadly representative of public opinion in the area. For example, one 2019 notice, jointly tendered by Guangdong’s provincial Public Security Bureau and Politics and Law Commission, sought two contractors to run its “sense of security” polls, directing each firm to conduct either a telephone survey or an on-site survey in the first half of the year, and then to swap these tasks for the second half. At the same time, however, not all localities or offices require such gold-standard methods, and even rigorously-conducted polls don’t matter if an ambitious cadre decides to quash the results.

Of course, China’s leaders have other means of collecting information on their citizens. Landry, the survey research expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wonders if public opinion might be more efficiently determined simply by harvesting personal data online: “If you have data on all the billion people, you don’t need a sample. Are surveys that useful when you have all this other stuff to supplement the data? Doing surveys is slow, it’s costly, people don’t talk, they don’t tell the truth, they’re hard to find, and you have to go back to them multiple times.” Indeed, the CCP may simply decide that their unprecedented ability to surveil their citizens both online and offline precludes the need for old-fashioned public opinion polling.

For now, though, the country’s leaders appear convinced that, loath as they may be to be held accountable, it still behooves them—occasionally—to ask for feedback.