Embedding Heterogenous Forms of Surveillance in China's Autocratic Networked Media

Abstract

In this article, Cornelia Bogen investigates the mechanisms that authoritarian governments use to subject economic actors and users to state control and the subsequent social practices. The case studies presented here illustrate how the state's deep entanglement with platforms is meant to foster both economic and socio-political outcomes by allowing platforms to promote users' entrepreneurship and restricting their online business if they are radically indifferent to media content or Party censorship rules. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that China's model goes beyond the Western concept of surveillance capitalism, because the heterogeneous logics of marketisation are interconnected with types of state surveillance different from the ones described by Zuboff (2019) for democratic countries. Against the backdrop of Fuchs/Trottier's (2015) theoretical model of social media surveillance, the societal implications of categorical suspicion, social sorting, and surveillance creep play out differently. The diffusion of China's institutional setting into e-platforms provokes culture-specific narratives (Versailles literature) and social online practices utilising networked images (barrage subtitling, human flesh search) unseen in Western online publics to date. Hence, studies of surveillance mechanisms in China's digital space need to be embedded within the larger context of political economy and state control.