Under Watchful Eyes: How Surveillance Technologies Collect and Disseminate Information for the State

Abstract

Surveillance entails the systematic and routine collection of data to inform governance strategies, often designed to be minimally intrusive to avoid public scrutiny and justified by the need for public safety. However, China's surveillance apparatus has pervasively intruded into private lives and expanded broadly in a highly visible manner, yet it has managed to minimize public backlash. My dissertation investigates the underlying purposes behind this governmental expansion of surveillance and citizen perceptions of this extensive growth. Contrary to conventional wisdom that primarily views surveillance as a tool for information collection, I argue that it also serves a role in information dissemination, which occurs through the sustained deployment of labor-intensive surveillance measures and the incorporation of moral framing in promoting surveillance initiatives. Drawing upon a comprehensive database on surveillance and resistance in China, the first essay demonstrates that despite the availability of cost-effective digital alternatives, the Chinese government continues to rely on human operators for surveillance given their effectiveness in preventing grievances from escalating into unrest. The second essay illustrates that individual moral convictions strongly predict support for surveillance in China with evidence from the World Values Survey. This suggests that surveillance is perceived as aligned with moral imperatives rather than a compromise of morals for security. The third essay employs a survey experiment to examine the impacts of specific moral frames - care, fairness, and authority - on support for surveillance. The findings indicate that all these moral frames significantly enhance support for surveillance, with the care frame producing the most substantial and broad-based increase in support.