The Sentinel State
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China has emerged as one of the 21st century's most consequential nations, making it more important than ever to understand how the country is governed. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system.

I'm Jude Blanchett, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, and this week I'm joined by Minxin Pei, Tom and Margot Pritzker 72 Professor of Government at Claremont Mechanic College. He is also the editor of the China Leadership Monitor. Today we'll be discussing his latest book, The Sentinel State, Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, which was recently published by Harvard University Press. Minxin, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Jude. It's a pleasure.

So this is a real honor and a pleasure, first of all, to say that I'm so glad that I've gotten to build a relationship and a friendship with you. You were...

one of the very, very first analysts of China's political system that I ever read when I was a young, budding student of China. And I remember China's transition being a really big influence on me when I read it in around 2008, I think is when? 2006. 2006, sorry. Maybe I bought the paperback when it came out. And you have always been someone who has just shaped my thinking and pushed my thinking and

As we'll discuss today, I'm also extraordinarily impressed and humbled by your productivity because you have this wonderful new book, The Sentinel State, which just came out. I know you just completed a book that I want to ask you a little bit about at the end of the podcast. So it is just a real delight and honor. And I wish we could do a whole podcast just on your productivity methods because they're something for all of us to envy and emulate. I want to

spend the bulk of this conversation really digging into the Sentinel State, which is such an achievement. It is historically rich, it is methodologically rich, and it gets to just a fundamental feature of the current Chinese party state. And one that for all of its obvious importance, I feel like when reading your book, I realized how much I did not know about this issue. So I think I'll

Just start at the beginning, as I do with all guests, and say, if you could tell us a little bit about how your intellectual interest in the party state, in China's political system, in regime resiliency, where did all of this come from for you? Okay. Well, thanks again, Jude. I think it came from the Cultural Revolution. When the Cultural Revolution began, when I was about nine years old,

So my teenage years were the formative years during which I grew very interested in politics because politics had so much impact on my family's life, on my life. So my interest in politics began that way. But my life took a detour. I spent four years in a Chinese factory during the Cultural Revolution, couldn't go to college.

thanks to Link Xiaoping. College reopened in 1977. Then I got into college, but I studied English Lit because my English was really good. So my undergraduate major was English Literature. Then in 1984, I got a scholarship to come to study in the US. So this year marks the 40th anniversary of my arrival in the US. Because my scholarship was for creative writing,

My interest was politics. So as soon as I arrived in the US, that was University of Pittsburgh, I began to pivot to a political science. While I was taking my required courses, I also went to the policy department to take courses at the graduate level, political science, because I wanted to show that I could do it.

Luckily, in 1986, I got into Harvard, the top political science department in the country, and studied under the late, great Rod McFarquhar, the really preeminent political scientist on China. I also studied under Sammy Huntington, so I had two giants in the field. And I finished my PhD in 1991. For more than three decades, I've been a China scholar.

And one of the key consistent themes across your work back to the 1990s is trying to understand the strength, resilience, or conversely, weakness and fragility of the Chinese system. Where did that particular interest come from for you? That interest originated in my earlier work on comparative communism.

Because the late 1980s, when I was doing my dissertation, the Soviet Union was coming apart.

The whole communist world was imploding. Such powerful systems, when they implode, there's got to be a reason. So I began to focus on the process of transition. This kind of regime becomes brittle, acquires resilience in the process of change. The idea that influenced me most was Alex de Tocqueville.

who's sort of the Ancien Regime and the French Revolution that I coined a term called the Tocqueville Paradox, is that when bad regimes try to be good, as I said, they become really sort of vulnerable to popular uprising. So that's how I developed my interest in regime strengths or fragility.

Now, of course, not only do you recommend de Tocqueville's Ancien Regime, but Wang Qishan also recommends Cadres to read that book. I know. But he misread it. He only focused on the part I said just now. But de Tocqueville actually had something, a much more profound explanation. That kind of regime becomes brittle largely not because they tried to reform, but mostly because they reformed way too late.

Let's talk about this book, The Sentinel State, which was published earlier this year.

and is the culmination of years of really intense research by you. Let's just start first with origins of the book. What was the missing piece of the puzzle when you looked at the existing literature on China's surveillance state that put you on this path? It was a two-stage process. I finished my third book called China's Chronic Capitalism, which looks at the pervasive corruption in the post-Tamil era. After I finished that book,

I said, well, what's my next project going to be? So it's around 2016, the Chinese economy began to sputter. And I thought, if performance legitimacy is not going to be strong, then what would enable the Chinese Communist Party to retain power? And I said, it has to be repression. So I began to look into the repressive apparatus you might call the Weiwen, the stability maintenance system.

But it's a huge topic. I did not know where to begin. So I've got to find an entry point. So what will the entry point be? Then I think around that time, China's techno surveillance state began to attract a lot of media attention.

So that piqued my interest as well. So maybe surveillance could be this entry point. I began to look. It turns out there's not much written on the surveillance system in the academic literature. In the popular media coverage on this topic, the focus is all on high tech.

As somebody who knows how the party is organized, I said, that does not seem to make a lot of sense. China had a very strong surveillance system far before it had a sort of pervasive technocratic surveillance system. So I said, well, I need to dig deeper. This is how the process, how the idea germinated. I said, there has to be an organizational aspect.

to the surveillance because hardware is readily available, but hardware has to be matched with an organizational infrastructure in order to be effective. And tell us just a little bit about how you did the research for this book. Yeah, research is very hard because you cannot go to China and interview policemen, party officials in charge of domestic security. Most of the materials are classified. The

because it's about informants, about the organization of the secret police, about their operational tactics. It's very hard to find. When I reviewed existing literature on China's policing system, you really don't know a whole lot. There's this library in Hong Kong at the Chinese University called University Service Center, which unfortunately has been shut down.

It has a lot of yearbooks, a lot of police gazettes, these brief histories of police. Some of them are for internal circulation. There are now some readily available, but that library was able to get a lot of those. So I began to dig, dig, dig, six years. And then I also looked at a lot of local yearbooks. China is a big country, 3,000 counties and districts.

300 cities, they all publish annual reports. And in those annual reports, you can find references to policing, what they call political legal work, which is really domestic security. Because the system is so vast, there has to be leakage. That is, they cannot ensure that sensitive information is not disclosed accidentally.

So I've gone through thousands of these yearbooks and lo and behold, I was able to collect enough data to piece together the puzzle that is how the system is organized. Some of the basic information, the size of the informants network, for example,

the size of the surveillance program in terms of targets, what kind of people they watch, what kind of tactics they use. So this is how the book was written. It took a long time, but

Everything came together only about three years ago. I can tell it's March 2021 when I, through some pure accident, I found a digital gold mine, which enabled me to do keyword search. I want to ask you a few specific questions about China's approach to surveillance, but let me ask you just more of a pure dictatorship question. Why do dictatorships construct surveillance states?

Is this about protecting regime security? Are there other reasons that I'm not thinking of about why the importance of a comprehensive surveillance state? We all know dictatorships rely on repression to survive. So violent repression is the defining feature of any dictatorship. But the problem with repression is that it can be very expensive.

There are two kinds of repression. One is reactive repression, that is, something happens, an uprising, unrest happens, and you have to use force to suppress it. Tiananmen being the best example, it's extremely costly, destabilizing. So most regimes, if they can, they don't want to use reactive repression, but they they

They would not hesitate if that is their last resort. So the smarter way is to use what I call preventive repression. That is, you try to prevent unrest or uprising or protests from taking place. And that requires surveillance. That requires keeping your eyes on known targets.

know what they are trying to do, following their activities. But surveillance is very complex. It's not an easy task. We think, oh, surveillance, put some cameras on. That's the easy part because surveillance requires a very extensive organizational network.

So this is where China's one-party state comes in. You look at other dictatorships, personal dictatorships, military hunters, they don't do as good a job as the Leninist systems because the Leninist systems have organizational presence throughout society at every level down to villages, neighborhoods. So they can organize informal networks. They can

operate surveillance systems much more effectively than other kinds of dictatorships. So this is the basic argument, that it is the organization's stupid, so to speak. Just to get another generic question about dictatorships and surveillance systems, there's something that you talk about in the book called the coercive dilemma.

which is the flip side of this organizational piece. Can you talk a bit about what some of the risks a dictator runs when he builds out a system capable of comprehensive surveillance? Well, the coercive dilemma is that dictatorships rely on violence to survive, but in order for them to have effective controls of violence, they have to have a large repressive apparatus. So the dilemma is that

On the one hand, you need a very effective repressive apparatus. On the other hand, if the repressive apparatus becomes too powerful, it can become the threat to the regime itself. So it's all about how do you have

effective repression, but also avoid having boomerang. That is the repression apparatus becoming a threat to the regime itself. And I think China does a much better job, and I'll explain why later on. But there are other challenges in terms of surveillance.

That is, you have to have enough resources. Surveillance is very expensive. A lot of manpower, a lot of equipment. Also, surveillance requires much more sophisticated operations than just beating people, getting people arrested. So there are two other separate challenges. But the real political challenge is to deal with the dilemma. Let's now get into the... You've already laid out the broad...

arguments of the book. But let me now ask you, can you be a bit more concrete? If you're sitting at a bar and someone sits up next to you and says, you know, Minxin, describe what the Chinese surveillance state is. What are to you the major building blocks at that organizational level of the surveillance state? I would say it's a multi-layered system, very different from other dictatorships, even more sophisticated than the

East Germany's Stasi. East Germany's Stasi up to this point is considered gold standard for surveillance. Now in what I call garden variety dictatorship, the only agency

in charge of surveillance is the secret police. But in China, you have other organizations involved in this. So China has more organizations involved rather than giving the task to a police agency. So the first characteristic is multi-layered. You might call it defense in depth, several lines of defense. The second characteristic is that the party is in charge.

Because how do you deal with the coercive dilemma? You have to have trusted party apparatus rather than security organizations.

agents in charge of surveillance. So the Chinese party has this organization, which you know as well, it's called the Political Legal Committee. The Central Political Legal Commission at the national level, provincial level, there is this vertical organization. It's

Broadly speaking, it's in charge of domestic security, but it is also the party bureaucracy that oversees surveillance. So I looked at the Soviet Union and East Germany. They did not have an equivalent party organization.

party bureaucracy in charge of domestic security and surveillance. So that's the second characteristic. And third is that they also split the task within the state. That is, the Chinese secret police is not like the KGB. China does not have a KGB. China's system is very similar to MI5, FBI, NCI. That is, MSS is in charge of

external espionage, domestic surveillance is given to the Ministry of Public Security, specifically Bureau No. 1. Now it's called Political Security Protection.

That way they avoid creating one secret police agency can monopolize this activity and the information. The KGB did both and Stasi did both. So China's system is a bit more sophisticated. So that's one. And third is they just do not rely on secret police alone. They recruit a very large number of informants to assist the police because they

China, until recently, was a very poor country. So it has to recruit a lot of civilians to help the police to monitor targets. And finally, the fifth piece is much more organized system of identifying potential threats. I want to linger on that fourth category of public participation in these surveillance efforts. Perhaps people's perception of China...

is of this very Orwellian sort of panopticon state with CCTV cameras and AI-enabled tracking software. And that's true, but...

But when you're in China, the thing I notice the most is the old grannies with the red armbands, the popular element of this. And this is, of course, not to say at all as if everybody is working on behalf of the party state. But you do notice, you see it very much in, it comes to the fore when you have moments like there's a big party meeting or some sort of big event, you can feel the security presence in a very visible way. Talk about how and where...

the security apparatus is able to draw on or leverage everyday citizens as a part of their surveillance or security efforts. What does that look like? In the book, there is a chapter, The Network Informers. Police,

has its network of informers. These are much more secret, but the party, not specific to the party itself, but of units, government units, universities, factories, shops, hotels, they all have their informants. So the party has one special advantage. The Chinese party state has one special advantage because it controls a lot of leverage.

If you want a job, if you want to join the party, you've got to do something for the party. So writing reports on your colleagues or your fellow classmates is something you've got to do. So that is the leverage. And if you're a businessman, a lot of informants are actually shop owners, shopkeepers. If you want to renew your business license, got to do something. Keep an eye. One of the

categories of taxi drivers, for example, favored recruits for the police as informants because they take people from one place to another, can provide information on their movements, but also their driver's license, their operating license had to be renewed. So in other words, the Chinese state, through its control of social activities and economic activities,

has a lot of leverage over the people and then can force them to work for the state. This is not true of other dictatorships where the state does not have similar leverage. So this is the overall situation. So in universities, we have in every classroom, every college, they all have a fixed quota of informants.

This is based on official sources released by Chinese universities. Because if you graduate, you want to go to grad school, you have advantages if you want to join the party. So that's how this happens. And we can talk about the size and what they actually do later on. Talk to me about the effectiveness. As you were just talking about having quotas,

The problem with quotas is oftentimes you could imagine a local security actor just bringing people on, not based on the quality of the information that they are able to gather, but simply so they can be showing that they're meeting official metrics. How effective do you think key parts of this system are, especially that public participation part? There are three categories of informants. One category is recruited by police. Much smaller, much more elite,

Probably much more effective, they're called special intelligence personnel. Then you have a second category recruited by your local police stations. They are called literally ears and eyes for law enforcement. Information on these two categories is really classified, so you cannot find a lot.

Now, the third category, xinxi yuan, informants, literally. We have a lot of information on this. We don't know that there is a specific quota system, even though I came across the reference to quota in universities. I suspect there is a quota system because in local yearbooks, local authorities would list the number of informants they recruit.

If there were not a quota system, there would be less reason for them to list. They want to show that they've done a good job. So on paper,

China's network of informants in this category, the third category, is vast. It's roughly almost close to 1% of the population, which could be 14 million. So on paper, it's very large because local officials want to meet a quota. But then when you look at, are they really productive?

They're not really very productive. Only about 40% of them, based on my estimate, deliver a piece of information to the government per year. Most are not very productive. So how do you explain this? I have an explanation that is. The leverage works when the party secretary or some government official comes to you and says, "Hey Jude, do you want to work as an informant?" You cannot say no, because if you say no, there will be bad consequences.

But once you agree, then the pressure goes away because the guy is not going to come back. Well, if he comes back to you and says, Jude, have you heard anything? You say, yeah, I have not really heard much. I've been keeping my eyes open, but not much is going on. So I think this kind of dynamic is at work because a lot of the Chinese people really don't want to be involved in this kind of morally...

problematic behavior, sort of activity. You have to apply a big discount. Then the question, is the system effective? I think at the end of the day, the system achieves its intended purpose. That is, it creates pervasive distrust and fear. It doesn't matter whether Jude is ratting on you or not. The fact that I know that Jude could be

and government informer would make me act much more carefully. So the government achieves its purpose. Talk about the capabilities of this system outside of China's borders. Unfortunately, I really don't know much about this because the system official materials, open source materials don't say much.

If I have to guess, the system does not work outside China's borders. All the advantages, all the strengths of the system rely on the party state. There's no such thing as the Chinese party state outside its borders. So you can hear anecdotal stories of surveillance harassment

But if I have to guess, the infrequency, the details of those stories appear to be quite disorganized, quite haphazard. I'm sure they do activities outside, but I don't think that they have the same kind of well-organized system.

Minchin, I want to now connect the thesis of the book with the other big question you've been thinking about throughout your career, which is on the resiliency of the party state system. So you had mentioned that one of the reasons you undertook this research is because if the quote unquote performance legitimacy quotient is going to decrease, in other words, the party state will not be able to

promote and facilitate the types of economic outcomes that will bind the people to the Chinese state and keep it legitimate. They will have to use the coercive tool, the less carrot, more stick. Put these two pieces together now. They've built out this comprehensive surveillance state that leverages everything from high tech to low tech, public participation, not in a way that facilitates trust, but as you say, it deteriorates it.

Do you think at a high level that this coercive element will be as much of a binding agent to keep the party state resilient? The bigger stick will compensate for the diminishment of the carrot. Very well put. I think increasingly they've got to rely more on...

coercion than incentives or performance, but they have several problems. Regimes such as the Chinese Communist Party fear two things. One is

They fear their own people. The others, they fear each other. So the threat both comes from within and from below. So today, the system is much less resilient than before because it faces threats from below. People are much less content because of economic hardships. A threat from within, the elites are much less unified than before. They live in constant fear of...

purge. It's very different from, say, 10, 15 years ago when there was some kind of security pact among the ruling elites, at least at the top, not going to be sentenced to life on some trumped up charges. Now, let's just talk about the piece at the

a well-performing economy when the number of people you need to watch is relatively small. Based on my research, the total number of people on their watch lists, they have two watch lists or blacklists, about 1% of the population.

It does not take a lot for that 1% to become 5%. So if you have 5% of the population who are very unhappy, we're talking about 70 million people. Watching 70 million people, I think will overwhelm the system. So the system is not going to be as effective. And the other problem we need to be aware of is that the system is very expensive. And to make things worse,

The system's operating expenses are funded by local governments and local budgets severely strained these days because of the real estate bust. So going forward, I think the system will operate less effectively. But does that mean the Communist Party will lose control? I don't think so.

I think as surveillance is less effective, it will have to use much more reactive repression. The appearance of stability will be severely eroded. But I just don't see a situation where the threat from below can overwhelm the party's control. Let me ask you a question about that, though. How interconnected...

are these? Does it make an elite challenge easier when there is public discontent? I would imagine so. What you have is that there is sort of an interactive process. You have more public discontent, more local discontent, and then local elites would grumble, would complain about how difficult it is to get things done, and these things will percolate upwards.

Now the problem is that, talking about Xi Jinping, it's all about how that kind of internal discontent, both within the party and within Chinese society, can weaken his power. If he can control the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the military, he's invulnerable, no matter what kind of content. Dictatorships die straight.

not many of them can actually be overstrained by their own people. And it's very difficult to carry out political coup against a top leader with solid control of the security apparatus. So I think you have a lot of decay, deterioration, but no serious threat to somebody like Xi. Let me ask a related question. Do you foresee a point where under a Xi Jinping administration,

a fundamental pivot of approach to economic policy is possible towards something that is much more pro-growth? Or do you think Xi Jinping will just continue to drive in this hyper-securitized direction irrespective of what the outcomes are for or the impact is on economic growth? I think he probably can adjust the balance a little bit, but the direction of travel is set. I do not see a fundamental shift.

because a fundamental shift will require these things that will hurt his own political interests. Implicitly, it will acknowledge a huge mistake. Chinese leaders at that level don't acknowledge mistakes because that will undercut his political authority. Second, that kind of shift will require decentralization of power.

That is not something that he would like very much. And third, that would also empower technocratic people rather than political upper cheeks. Again, that's something probably he does not like. So I just don't see, in terms of his own political interests, that such a directional change will happen. Final question, Min-Chin. When you peer into your crystal ball,

and look at China 10 years from now, what would be your guess on where it will be? Where will its economy be? Where will its foreign policy be? And what will be the resiliency of that core leadership group around Xi Jinping be?

Yeah, I think the economy probably will continue to grow, but at a much slower level because there is still quite a bit of momentum potential in the system. The Chinese private sector, they've got to survive and their contribution will sustain the economy, but it will not outperform our expectations. It will probably struggle along 2% to 3%.

So the system, largely we see a decade of stagnation, subpar performance. The party will still be in power. I just don't see anything within the Communist Party or within Chinese society that could change the status quo. I think we're really waiting for the end of the Xi era to happen. What brings that about? Most likely an act of nature. I think foreign policy is much more

more difficult, much more uncertain because we're dealing with a world system in flux. We don't know what sort of the war in Ukraine will lead to. U.S.-China relationship is still trying to find a flaw. But I think if

Within 10 years, there's no major military conflict. We will be very lucky. I found, sadly, that last statement of yours is probably at the outer bounds of optimistic when I ask people what they expect for the next 10 years, which is itself just a sad statement about how much the situation has deteriorated. Thank you very much for your time. And again, want to just commend

listeners go purchase The Sentinel State. It is an absolutely fascinating and vital book for understanding China, one that I think really pushes our understanding beyond great reporting being done on China's surveillance state by outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, which really are capturing the high-tech element of this. But I think Minxin's book

marries the organizational and the bottom-up element that is vital for understanding China's surveillance state. So Minxin, again, continue to learn from and appreciate your scholarship and thank you for your time today. Well, thank you, Jude. It's been a great pleasure.

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