Pandemic surveillance in China: An interpretation beyond the top-down approach

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, China has been at the forefront of deploying technology for the containment of the virus. The use of such technologies has been interpreted by Western observers as a tool that the Chinese government has adopted with the aim of establishing a so-called “digital authoritarianism”, a sort of technology-based dictatorship, in which an Orwellian form of central government seems to be everywhere, watching everything from above. Going beyond this top-down approach, the present paper tries to demonstrate how, at least at the onset of the pandemic, Chinese surveillance was in fact a “liquid” practice, a decentralised and scattered form of digital monitoring, co-constructed by local governments, shared by private enterprises, and supported by the users themselves. It is precisely to stem the initial excessive “liquidity” of the surveillance phenomenon, that the Chinese authorities passed a series of laws and regulations, giving rise to a new model of social control, which is moving along a different path than the Western-style “surveillance capitalism”.