Living with digital surveillance in China. Citizens' stories about technology, privacy and governance

Digital surveillance is an everyday fact of life in China. The monograph Living with Digital Surveillance in China: Citizens' Narratives on Technology, Privacy, and Governance, recently published in the Routledge Studies in Surveillance series, explores what Chinese citizens mean by this surveillance and how they live with it. It interrogates their imaginary of surveillance and privacy in the light of China's historical and socio-political context. Based on a corpus of 58 semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted in China, a diary of observations and a review of interdisciplinary literature, Ariane Ollier-Malaterre attempts to decentralize research in the field of surveillance, which is essentially Western. Two main findings emerge from this analysis. Firstly, research participants weave a coherent system of distressing narratives about the moral shortcomings they attribute to China, to which other, redemptive narratives respond, presenting the government as a protective figure and technology as a solution to all problems and a civilizing force. Many research participants therefore see surveillance and social credit systems as indispensable to remedying China's moral problems. Yet this support for surveillance is coupled with sophisticated mental strategies to distance themselves from constant exposure to surveillance, and participants express frustration, fear and anger. Strong intrapsychic tensions thus characterize participants' imaginations of digital surveillance. The author also reflects on her fieldwork in China as a foreign researcher. She discusses her choices to reduce her Eurocentric biases as much as possible, and her learnings about interviewing in a context of political censorship.

About the speaker

Ariane Ollier-Malaterre is a professor of management and holder of the Canada Research Chair on Digital Regulation in Professional and Personal Life at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research focuses on digital technologies and work-life boundaries in different national contexts. She has co-authored over 75 chapters and peer-reviewed articles in management, sociology, psychology and information systems journals.

Discussants: Chloé Froissart, professor of political science at Inalco and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, director of research at CERI