The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates a society-wide system of tech-enhanced authoritarian governance, facilitated by a sophisticated online censorship apparatus and internet-linked physical surveillance devices. In addition to online repression and surveillance, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has become the world’s primary case study of so-called ‘techno-authoritarianism’, as the CCP increases its grip on power through an expanding and near-ubiquitous physical and digital surveillance apparatus.

The surveillance apparatus now blankets the whole country, but there are differences in intensity and deployment between regions. For example, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China has long been subject to party-state authorities’ crackdowns aimed at repressing and culturally-assimilating the local Muslim minorities. That has included a brutal arbitrary detention system and the institution of a more intense surveillance system across the region.

While China’s huge population and local differences make it difficult to make any generalised assessment based on the datasets obtained, deployed platforms can nonetheless add to our understanding of the Chinese population’s views on important and complex issues.

For this project, an interactive digital platform provided PRC residents with an alternative pathway to express individual opinions on surveillance technologies, ultimately enabling direct information sharing with PRC residents and facilitating high levels of engagement. The research platform engaged more than 55,000 individuals over four months.

In any context, public-opinion data comes with the caveat that participants might not respond completely truthfully to every question. That risk is higher in contexts in which expressing dissenting opinions carries personal risks, and perhaps even more so for a sensitive issue such as surveillance. Notwithstanding those limitations, which must be taken into consideration when examining our findings, this report furthers our understanding of the expansion of surveillance in the PRC, how the implementation of those technologies is communicated by the Chinese Government, and what types of concerns those technologies raise.