Guarding Dictatorship: China's Surveillance State.
Despite extensive media coverage of the technological capabilities of China’s surveillance state, we know relatively little about its organization and operational tactics. By combing through official documents, this talk presents a picture of China’s surveillance state that sharply contrasts its portrayal in the media. The most important factor that makes China’s surveillance state so fearsome is not its technological capabilities, but the Communist Party’s unrivalled organizational capacity. China’s ‘distributed surveillance’ relies on both formal coercive security agencies and non-coercive organizations in a Leninist party-state. This model of surveillance not only addresses the ‘coercive dilemma’ but also performs ‘preventive repression’ far more effectively than approaches to surveillance in other dictatorships.

Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on US–China Relations.
Date: 1 May 2023, 17:00 (Monday, 2nd week, Trinity 2023)
Venue: Dickson Poon Building, Canterbury Road OX2 6LU
Venue Details: Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre (lower ground floor)
Speaker: Professor Minxin Pei (Claremont McKenna College)
Organising department: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Organiser: Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: information@chinese.ox.ac.uk
Host: Professor Todd Hall (University of Oxford)
Part of: China Centre talks
Booking required?: Not required
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Clare Orchard