China Successfully Crushes All Dissent

[uppi]

What does this describe, the automation of how authoritarian regimes already operate? There's no fundamental shift, here, just the ability for the state to shift manpower to other tasks. There's not even a guarantee that the algorithm is more effective than manual review, only the expectation that the savings in manpower would outweigh the costs of a less efficient system.

Digital automation is rarely more efficient in itself, only more cost-effective. It's more likely that any serious move towards "social credit" is understood by the leadership as the modernisation of the existing surveillance-state rather than something fundamentally new. They will present it as such to the public, but that's because they're trying to present it as something other than a surveillance system.

I agree that this is nothing fundamentally new. The mass surveillance by digital means is not going to produce much better data than ten officers of the secret police following someone around. But the gain in efficiency enables the state to massively extend the surveillance. Without automation it is simply impossible to control everyone. If they have a highly automated system, they can at least attempt to do so. It remains to be seen, how successful that is, but I don't think the possibility can be outright dismissed that some sort of social control will be established.

But, people aren't stupid. The Chinese populace are reported to be pretty cynical about their government, because they have to live with it, and know how inefficient and corrupt it can be, how far it acts as a vehicle for factional interests rather than as a coherent force, whether or not that force is applied for the public good. If the Chinese government is going to convince its populace that its new systems are capable of producing any coherent relationship between action and outcome, they are going to have to ensure that there is usually such a correspondence, that a failure to achieve correspondence appears as the exception, and it's absolutely unclear that the PRC has the means to do that. It's not as if people really trust the credit system, either, they just treat it as a great, dumb beast that has to be appeased.

Ah, but appeasement is exactly the goal here. Even if the people don't think too highly of it, as long as they comply, the government has a tool for social engineering. If the people suspect that doing X lowers their chances to get into university, get a car, a promotion or whatever, they might refrain from doing it, no matter what they think of the system. There needs to be some legitimacy because there is only so much arbitrariness the people will accept. But as long as many people think that noncompliance will result in future disadvantages, there will be many people who will comply. Just look at how many people comply with the credit score system, no matter what they think of it.

Most of that data is noise. That's a problem which has bedeviled security agencies for centuries: the majority of intelligence is empty. Human agents are rarely in a position to filter the useful from the irrelevant on the spot, and it's even less probable that an algorithm would. The archives of security agencies across Europe are full of trivial minutiae, which agents had to spend as much time filtering as they did collecting. Perhaps there's a further algorithm that can help the filtering- but those results will themselves need reviewed and filtered, and those results will need filtered, and there's no real guarantee of anything useful coming out of that process. As above, it's really just a way of automating existing processes, the value of which lies in cost-effectiveness over efficiency. Any serious repressive measures are still going to revolve around the direct surveillance of known dissidents.

The ability to collect massive amounts of data has been available for some time now and the filter methods were not able to keep up. Nut in recent years, there has been much progress in pattern recognition, so that filtering will become much easier in the future. And even if that just leads to increasing cost efficiency, this alone will open up more opportunities. Especially with minor offences there has always been somewhat of an enforcement gap, where the resources required to effectively control the issue would have been larger than the benefits of controlling it. Reduce the required resources and suddenly there is a much better case for stringent enforcement. How many times have you violated minor traffic rules and got away, because there was no police office around to punish you. Now imagine surveillance cameras with image recognition trained to recognize such violations and an automated system to give you a fine. If the false positive rate gets low enough, the state can enforce such rules much more rigidly.

 

[Hrothbern]

I see a farmer / small village culture with traditional social control mechanisms
Leveled up to modern technology to handle the gigantic scaling up
And in the party the old bunch of feudal elite, settling state affairs beteeen them

 

[Verbose]

I see this as about what kind of society the Chinese Communist Party has built, and what the CCP is. The technology is still neutral, or perhaps amoral, in this. It's about what kind of state, in what kind of society, is about to harness it?

 

[Verbose]

The ability to collect massive amounts of data has been available for some time now and the filter methods were not able to keep up.

That would also seem to rest on an assumption that the objective of the exercise is to find out what the people the data is collected from actually want/need. It's simplified if the objective is to go to work on them and change that. As long as one doesn't care overly much about breakage, that wouldn't seem a strong objection. Just assume the civil society is not a thing in itself, but something in need of your control and correction.

 

[aelf]

All this sounds Confucian enough. I can't imagine why people would think the Chinese wouldn't agree with it to a significant extent.

Lots of people lament that Mao destroyed Chinese traditions. Well, he destroyed some and he perpetuated others. This development is a logical conclusion of some Chinese traditions that have continued.

 

[Kaitzilla]

The funniest thing about this thread is that events in China are being portrayed as the downfall of liberty. I don't recall China ever being viewed as the bellwether of democracy. If they improve a bit, or slide back a bit, does that really make a big difference for this issue? At this particular moment in history, when what has supposedly been the "light of democracy to the world" seems to be reversing course and begging for authoritarian rule to supplant their institutions does a country as far down the ranks as China really merit a lot of hand wringing?

Well, China merits hand wringing because 2018 is when their economy overtakes the Euro Zone.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-set-to-overtake-combined-euro-area-this-year

In most of the ways that matter China is now the world's #2 country, and it seems to think the 1984 novel was full of good ideas.

I thought their vast internet censorship program would never work, but it seems to be working decently well.
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-great-firewall-censorship-under-xi-jinping-2018-3

While the term "Great Firewall" used to describe the large number of international websites blocked from China — Google, Facebook, Twitter — PEN says that censorship on local platforms has soared over the past six years.
...

... "Before Xi Jinping we feared only that they would delete our posts. In the worst situation, they would delete [your account]," Qiao Mu, an academic told The Guardian in 2015. "But since Xi Jinping came to power this changed. They began to arrest people."

More on the Great Firewall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, China merits hand wringing because 2018 is when their economy overtakes the Euro Zone.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-set-to-overtake-combined-euro-area-this-year

In most of the ways that matter China is now the world's #2 country, and it seems to think the 1984 novel was full of good ideas.

I thought their vast internet censorship program would never work, but it seems to be working decently well.
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-great-firewall-censorship-under-xi-jinping-2018-3


More on the Great Firewall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall

Economically they are #2, so yeah, if their economy collapses then wring away and I'm right behind you.

But once again, in the grand scheme of individual liberty and human rights do the minor variations in a country that is even now much less totalitarian than they were for most of the previous century really serve as a valid distraction from the serious problem represented by the decline of the USA?

 

[rah]

While we may joke at the current bad algorithms and the massive amount of data to sniff through, I think it's silly to ignore how fast the technology will improve. The current ones, while somewhat laughable are greatly improved over a decade ago. Where they will be a decade from now may be unrecognizable.

 

[warpus]

I wonder how long until there's enough Chinese citizens who are not happy with the status quo and would prefer more freedom. Right now most Chinese citizens are just happy their country is doing well, it seems

 

[Broken_Erika]

The Difference between China and the West
China:Big Brother is Watching You!
The West:Big Brother is Monetizing You!

 

[warpus]

I mean just because we're not China doesn't mean that our governments are not also watching us. In fact we not only have the government watching us here in the west, but also our corporate overlords.

 

[Hrothbern]

I wonder how long until there's enough Chinese citizens who are not happy with the status quo and would prefer more freedom. Right now most Chinese citizens are just happy their country is doing well, it seems

That drive of the people for more freedom will increase no doubt.
I see these actions more as buying time by the Chinese govn to enable a substantial to full catch up with the west in terms of mature developed economy and similar GDP per Capita.

Think about how in the western world in the 60ies-70-ies the strong growth of economical prosperity, reaching levels above basic needs, triggered a lot of unrest among the youth, a lot of drive for improved work conditions among labor, and in general a higher level of indulgence of the masses affecting the financial room for the governments to invest in long term public and other infrastructure.
The longer Chinese govn can postpone freedom and luxuries for the masses, the longer it can invest in long term infra improvements, supporting a high level of economy later on.

China with 300% of GDP govn debt and a culture of very long term thinking, involved in very expensive govn projects, like military and resources in the South Chinese Sea, the new silk road with all the hubs, renewables, ordinary roads & housing (all over China, not just urban Shanghai), etc.

They just want no domestic surprises within the coming 2-3 decades at least

 

[aelf]

^That's an admirably Confucian way of thinking too.

I think many in the West underestimate how alright people can be with authoritarianism or paternalism.

 

[warpus]

That drive of the people for more freedom will increase no doubt.
I see these actions more as buying time by the Chinese govn to enable a substantial to full catch up with the west in terms of mature developed economy and similar GDP per Capita.

Think about how in the western world in the 60ies-70-ies the strong growth of economical prosperity, reaching levels above basic needs, triggered a lot of unrest among the youth, a lot of drive for improved work conditions among labor, and in general a higher level of indulgence of the masses affecting the financial room for the governments to invest in long term public and other infrastructure.
The longer Chinese govn can postpone freedom and luxuries for the masses, the longer it can invest in long term infra improvements, supporting a high level of economy later on.

China with 300% of GDP govn debt and a culture of very long term thinking, involved in very expensive govn projects, like military and resources in the South Chinese Sea, the new silk road with all the hubs, renewables, ordinary roads & housing (all over China, not just urban Shanghai), etc.

They just want no domestic surprises within the coming 2-3 decades at least

There is quite a different culture in the existing & growing Chinese middle class, and what we had in the western world in the 60-70s though. Chinese culture seems (to me, an outsider) to be quite.. collectivist? The individual does not matter so much. This is very different from the way we view the world here in the west, and might be a reason why it takes quite a bit longer for the people to rise up and demand more freedom in China. As things stand now, they don't seem to care about having more freedom. I've talked to a couple Chinese citizens in the past, and asked them what they think of the censorship for instance, the fact they can't access so many websites. "I don't care, we don't need those, we have our own versions of all those websites" they all tell me..

 

[Timsup2nothin]

^That's an admirably Confucian way of thinking too.

I think many in the West underestimate how alright people can be with authoritarianism or paternalism.

I think that we in the west underestimate how alright authoritarianism can be with the right authoritarians. When a Chinese dictator says "this is for the greatest good of the nation" the nation has more inclination to believe them; maybe because as @warpus says the culture is more collectivist, but also maybe because the leader in question is drawn from that culture and might be a telling the truth instead of just covering while lining his own pockets as greedily as possible.

 

[Hrothbern]

There is quite a different culture in the existing & growing Chinese middle class, and what we had in the western world in the 60-70s though. Chinese culture seems (to me, an outsider) to be quite.. collectivist? The individual does not matter so much. This is very different from the way we view the world here in the west, and might be a reason why it takes quite a bit longer for the people to rise up and demand more freedom in China. As things stand now, they don't seem to care about having more freedom. I've talked to a couple Chinese citizens in the past, and asked them what they think of the censorship for instance, the fact they can't access so many websites. "I don't care, we don't need those, we have our own versions of all those websites" they all tell me..

I can only agree of that difference betwen China and the West. Is pretty deep.
And introducing now limiting control fits current culture. What you say anekdotical fits that and fits what I knew of my Chinese colleagues of a couple of years ago.
But new generations can change that and Chinese govn does really think in long term.
Why take the risk ?

On that collective culture
yes
But I also think we have to recognise that from North to South there are cultural differences there.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Bottom line...if we reach a point where worldwide government is provided by a single authoritarian structure, what source would you rather that structure grew out of; the Chinese government or the US government?

 

[warpus]

Bottom line...if we reach a point where worldwide government is provided by a single authoritarian structure, what source would you rather that structure grew out of; the Chinese government or the US government?

Those are two extremes. Why not settle for something a bit more moderate? Maybe the European approach..

 

[Hrothbern]

Bottom line...if we reach a point where worldwide government is provided by a single authoritarian structure, what source would you rather that structure grew out of; the Chinese government or the US government?

Continental European government
a bit to the North-West
And Dutch style already too neo-liberal on left-right, the rest is ok-ish.

 

[red_elk]

Bottom line...if we reach a point where worldwide government is provided by a single authoritarian structure, what source would you rather that structure grew out of; the Chinese government or the US government?

Neither. I would prefer Chinese-style technocracy, but more liberal than the current one in China.