BEIJING — About once a month, Hao Jian is politely asked by the police “to have a cup of tea.” He knows it wouldn’t be prudent to say, “No thank you.”
A government critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr. Hao signed Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto modeled on Charter 77, the 1977 document that helped usher in the end of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia. He has participated in forums about democracy and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where his cousin died from a bullet wound.
The police tap his phone, read his email and follow him. On special occasions, like for several months after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, the government forbids him to leave China. “To me, your life is totally transparent,” a police officer told Mr. Hao during one of his recent chats.
Among my acquaintances and friends like Hao Jian, dozens are compelled to lead transparent lives. And in addition to government critics, the authorities watch organizers of church services held in private homes, Falun Gong practitioners and simple petitioners. No one knows how many people are under surveillance. We can’t even be sure which agency oversees that daunting task.
The Edward J. Snowden affair finally raised a chilling question for the whole world: How much privacy do citizens have to give up for the sake of public security? For us Chinese, this question is slightly different: How much privacy do we have to give up for the sake of the government’s security?
China is blanketed with surveillance cameras. They have been installed on most streets, in supermarkets and in classrooms. The official purpose of this growing network — known as Skynet — is often described as “law-and-order management.” But high-profile crimes — like the murder of an infant in a stolen car in Jilin Province earlier this year — suggest that the cameras have little to do with fighting crime: The costly camera network was criticized by the public for failing to find a suspect in that case.
By contrast, the surveillance system worked perfectly when targeting Li Tiantian, a Shanghai-based human rights lawyer. According to Ms. Li, security officials tried to show her boyfriend video footage of her walking into a hotel with other men, suggesting she was unfaithful. (He refused to watch it.)
The main purpose of the surveillance, of course, is control and intimidation. For almost a decade, “weiwen,” or “maintaining social stability,” has been the government’s public mantra, but this pursuit is simply a way to justify the Communist Party’s hold on power. “Stability” has been deemed more important than education, health care and even national defense. In the 2012 government budget, expenses for domestic security exceeded $111 billion, compared with a defense budget of $106 billion.
Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing who is in prison for seeking refuge in a U.S. Consulate in 2012, among other crimes, gave a glimpse of how the surveillance power is abused. He boasted in 2010 that his city’s surveillance system had identified 4,000 “unwelcome” people who had entered Chongqing around the time of Chinese New Year. Most of them were found and forced to leave the city within hours.
Yet most Chinese citizens seem unconcerned about living transparent lives. Even on social media, the most open opinion platform in China, few people question the legality and necessity of the extensive surveillance network. A survey conducted in 2012 among students in Central China Normal University showed that only about 55 percent of them were opposed to the installation of cameras in dormitories.
As an outspoken writer, I have become paranoid. I often suspect that I am being followed and videotaped, but I have no way of proving it. I occasionally turn around to see if the police are nearby. When I sit down at a café with friends, I often cannot help checking under the table for a listening device.
My internal battle to fight off the constant fear of not knowing what could happen to me at the hands of the government affects my judgment. I don’t know if this has affected my writing. Intuition tells me it hasn’t, but I have trouble trusting my intuition. It is the breakdown of trust — trust of oneself, trust of others — that is the worst consequence of living a transparent life.
At a party a few months ago, I witnessed one friend accusing another of being an agent for the Communist Party. It was not an isolated incident. I cannot avoid the thought that among my acquaintances someone is spying on me. I tell myself to be sincere with everyone, but my sincerity is frequently mixed with caution.
People under surveillance often cannot help look for ulterior motives behind ordinary social interactions. We are cautious when interacting with strangers. If a conversation with a stranger is inevitable, we tend to avoid speaking our minds. We fear whatever we say may be used against us. A friend recently told me that he has not made a single good friend in the past few years because it is difficult for him to trust people.
The Chinese government talks about building a “harmonious society.” But how can a society become truly harmonious if surveillance cameras are everywhere and everyone has to live with suspicion and fear? What kind of lives can we lead without trust?
Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.” This article was adapted from a speech delivered in New York on Nov. 14 at a symposium on surveillance, co-sponsored by PEN America. It was translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz from the Chinese.
Thanks, hope the NYT don't mind. I can't be bothered with proxies and VPN's - whenever I find a free one that works, the party doesn't last long, so I don't bother much anymore.
He was afraid to go to (A) any country with an extradition treaty with the United States (B) any US ally. It just goes to show that most of the countries of the world actually do like the United States I guess/or could've in his opinion been coerced to extradite him.
>> "It just goes to show that most of the countries of the world actually do like the United States"
I doubt countries support the US in things like Snowden because they 'like' them. They do it because the US is powerful and the repercussions of not extraditing Snowden aren't worth it to them.
It may seem hard to believe, but countries like Germany did operate by the assumption that the Americans at least have good intentions. Everybody knows that the US can and will push their agenda when they think it is important, but often nobody sees real harm in cooperating either.
That is also why the spying on Merkel is extremely harmful to American-German relations. It changes the view of the public at large on the US.
Actually, that is the oddest part of the story, to my mind.
Is it really true that Merkel, or any other major political figure in any major country, believed that they weren't being watched by essentially every other country, allied or not?
I can see that the public at large does not understand that, but the only reason I can find for the issue to come up is Merkel using that lack of understanding to manipulate German public opinions.
If the shoe were on the other foot, and it came out that German intelligence were listening to Mr. Obama's phone calls, I would at worst chuckle and at best be impressed if they came up with a new way of doing it. And I'd view any outrage from U.S. government circles as the cynical attempt at manipulation that it would be.
You have no idea what you're talking about, sit down. Hong Kong is nothing like China and the reasons he did it were well-documented and well-reasoned. I don't think you'd do something much less "ironic" if your government was threatening your ass.
How realistic is this in practice? On this side of the "great wall," it is relatively simple to create and use a VPN. Isn't it likely that VPNs are prohibited, or at least given special attention, within China?
I don't think they outright ban VPN just yet, but even if they did: get the OpenVPN source, XOR every incoming and outgoing byte with your favorite constant. That will already beat any packet detection engine out there (if you also take a little care to eliminate the "side channels", i.e. run it on a random port), while not compromising the security at all.
I wish we could just have dynamically mutating protocols, and Tor et al are certainly working in that direction, but for a single person with the education, this would be my way to go.
A government critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr. Hao signed Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto modeled on Charter 77, the 1977 document that helped usher in the end of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia. He has participated in forums about democracy and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where his cousin died from a bullet wound. The police tap his phone, read his email and follow him. On special occasions, like for several months after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, the government forbids him to leave China. “To me, your life is totally transparent,” a police officer told Mr. Hao during one of his recent chats.
Among my acquaintances and friends like Hao Jian, dozens are compelled to lead transparent lives. And in addition to government critics, the authorities watch organizers of church services held in private homes, Falun Gong practitioners and simple petitioners. No one knows how many people are under surveillance. We can’t even be sure which agency oversees that daunting task.
The Edward J. Snowden affair finally raised a chilling question for the whole world: How much privacy do citizens have to give up for the sake of public security? For us Chinese, this question is slightly different: How much privacy do we have to give up for the sake of the government’s security?
China is blanketed with surveillance cameras. They have been installed on most streets, in supermarkets and in classrooms. The official purpose of this growing network — known as Skynet — is often described as “law-and-order management.” But high-profile crimes — like the murder of an infant in a stolen car in Jilin Province earlier this year — suggest that the cameras have little to do with fighting crime: The costly camera network was criticized by the public for failing to find a suspect in that case.
By contrast, the surveillance system worked perfectly when targeting Li Tiantian, a Shanghai-based human rights lawyer. According to Ms. Li, security officials tried to show her boyfriend video footage of her walking into a hotel with other men, suggesting she was unfaithful. (He refused to watch it.)
The main purpose of the surveillance, of course, is control and intimidation. For almost a decade, “weiwen,” or “maintaining social stability,” has been the government’s public mantra, but this pursuit is simply a way to justify the Communist Party’s hold on power. “Stability” has been deemed more important than education, health care and even national defense. In the 2012 government budget, expenses for domestic security exceeded $111 billion, compared with a defense budget of $106 billion.
Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing who is in prison for seeking refuge in a U.S. Consulate in 2012, among other crimes, gave a glimpse of how the surveillance power is abused. He boasted in 2010 that his city’s surveillance system had identified 4,000 “unwelcome” people who had entered Chongqing around the time of Chinese New Year. Most of them were found and forced to leave the city within hours.
Yet most Chinese citizens seem unconcerned about living transparent lives. Even on social media, the most open opinion platform in China, few people question the legality and necessity of the extensive surveillance network. A survey conducted in 2012 among students in Central China Normal University showed that only about 55 percent of them were opposed to the installation of cameras in dormitories.
As an outspoken writer, I have become paranoid. I often suspect that I am being followed and videotaped, but I have no way of proving it. I occasionally turn around to see if the police are nearby. When I sit down at a café with friends, I often cannot help checking under the table for a listening device.
My internal battle to fight off the constant fear of not knowing what could happen to me at the hands of the government affects my judgment. I don’t know if this has affected my writing. Intuition tells me it hasn’t, but I have trouble trusting my intuition. It is the breakdown of trust — trust of oneself, trust of others — that is the worst consequence of living a transparent life.
At a party a few months ago, I witnessed one friend accusing another of being an agent for the Communist Party. It was not an isolated incident. I cannot avoid the thought that among my acquaintances someone is spying on me. I tell myself to be sincere with everyone, but my sincerity is frequently mixed with caution.
People under surveillance often cannot help look for ulterior motives behind ordinary social interactions. We are cautious when interacting with strangers. If a conversation with a stranger is inevitable, we tend to avoid speaking our minds. We fear whatever we say may be used against us. A friend recently told me that he has not made a single good friend in the past few years because it is difficult for him to trust people.
The Chinese government talks about building a “harmonious society.” But how can a society become truly harmonious if surveillance cameras are everywhere and everyone has to live with suspicion and fear? What kind of lives can we lead without trust?
Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.” This article was adapted from a speech delivered in New York on Nov. 14 at a symposium on surveillance, co-sponsored by PEN America. It was translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz from the Chinese.