China is using phone trackers and other tools to track protestors, the first time mass surveillance has been directed at middle-class people in affluent cities
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times has spent years documenting the build-out of China's surveillance state: a 2019 examination of poorly secured police and private databases showed the spying infrastructure being scaled up, and a June 2022 trove of procurement documents detailed software bought to sift surveillance data and 'predict' who becomes a troublemaker. Earlier in 2022, the paper showed how the state identifies and pressures critics abroad, including on Facebook and Twitter, targeting Chinese living overseas and foreign citizens.
What is new in this report is the target: phone trackers and related tools are now aimed at middle-class protestors in affluent cities, the first time mass surveillance has been turned on this population. The apparatus documented in the predictive-policing procurement documents is being applied domestically to a group that previously sat outside its scope.
First-order effects
- Middle-class residents of affluent Chinese cities who joined protests now face direct phone tracking and identification, moving them from bystanders to targets of the state's monitoring tools.
Second-order effects
- The same identification-and-pressure playbook documented against overseas critics gives the state a ready-made template for following up on domestically identified protestors, extending scrutiny from online speech to physical presence.
Third-order effects
- If surveillance infrastructure built for dissidents and border regions is now normalized against the urban middle class, the population subject to mass monitoring expands structurally — and the procurement pipeline documented in 2022 shows the state investing in software to automate exactly this kind of targeting at scale.
The trend: China's surveillance apparatus is expanding from targeted monitoring of dissidents and critics to mass, automated tracking of its own urban middle class, powered by years of accumulated data-sifting infrastructure.