Since 9/11, I’ve had the view that America’s security measures were wildly excessive and counterproductive. They very likely ended up costing lives by making flying so unpleasant. In the past, I’ve assumed that this reflected irrational fears among the public. Our bureaucrats are schooled in cost/benefit analysis and know that these measures are unwise. But politicians worry about being blamed by voters if there is another terrorist attack when the government had not “done everything it could” to prevent the attack.
After visiting China, I’m not so sure about this. China has security checks at all subway stations. It’s very difficult to enter an office building without permission. Many roads are blocked. I was especially surprised by the train stations, where security is far more intensive than in either Europe or Japan—basically three layers of controls before you can go to the tracks—including passport control for a high-speed train ride lasting 15 minutes. While the Chinese government does care about public opinion to some extent, it’s hard to believe that they are under as much pressure as elected governments in Europe and Japan. Then why the intensive security?
I suspect that part of this is the bureaucratic instinct for control. Thus if you visit a museum in China you first pass through security (which is something that also occurs in some places in the West.) But then you must also show a passport in order to get a ticket, even when the museum is free. So this isn’t just about security; it’s also about information.
China’s Social Credit system has gotten a lot of attention, but in my view the WeChat payment system is the bigger story. It’s increasingly difficult to buy things in China without having the WeChat app on your smartphone. For instance, many vending machines don’t take coins or bills, only WeChat. Ditto for some restaurants. A few days ago, we tried to buy a ride on a Ferris wheel in Tianjin, but you could only buy the tickets online. At the rate things are going, it wouldn’t surprise me if China became a completely cashless society at some point in the 21st century. (Good luck to tourists–you can’t even download WeChat without a Chinese bank account.)
In fairness, apps like WeChat offer enormous convenience for Chinese consumers. And even in the West, most people don’t seem to care about the loss of privacy from modern technology.
I doubt whether the Chinese government pays much attention to the WeChat purchases of individual Chinese citizens. And I’ve read that the Social Credit system is not very effective—so far. But I suspect that the trends I see in China will eventually spread elsewhere, and at some point all governments will become “potentially totalitarian” in the sense of having the technological capability of exercising total control over the population. They’ll be able to know everywhere you move, everything you read, and everything you buy. Whether they will actually exercise that control is another question, which I can’t answer.
I don’t like where the world is headed. But perhaps younger people are comfortable with all this technology.
READER COMMENTS
MB
Sep 3 2019 at 12:48pm
Did you check if the metal detectors, scanners etc. were plugged in? Seriously. All the stations are manned by PLA “volunteers” that don’t care. I used to empty my pockets to go through security, then I noticed most of the metal detectors were literally unplugged. The few times that I set off the detectors, the PLA volunteers just kept waving people through – so I just kept walking. Maybe it is more strict at government buildings, but at transit points – it is the definition of security theater.
Scott Sumner
Sep 3 2019 at 8:06pm
That sounds quite plausible. I see people say the same about the TSA.
Daniel R. Grayson
Sep 3 2019 at 2:49pm
Re: “Good luck to tourists–you can’t even download WeChat without a Chinese bank account.”
No, I’ve had WeChat on my phone since my 2016 visit and use it to communicate with in-laws, but have never had a Chinese bank account.
Daniel R. Grayson
Sep 3 2019 at 2:49pm
… the options involving money are disabled.
Scott Sumner
Sep 3 2019 at 8:06pm
Yes, I meant WeChat for purchases.
MarkW
Sep 3 2019 at 4:48pm
So this isn’t just about security; it’s also about information.
If information is the goal, then there’s no need to be as heavy handed as security checks when license plate scanners, mobile-phone trackers, and security cameras with facial recognition can do the job surreptitiously.
Lorenzo from Oz
Sep 3 2019 at 7:03pm
Why can’t it be about bureaucratic empire-building? The bureaucratisation of Western societies is a major, largely invisible, element in social and cultural changes.
Consider the graph on the growth of physicians and health administrators in this excerpt from Uwe Reinhardt’s last book. Physicians have about doubled since 1970, health administrators have gone up more than 30 fold. The security field is just following in a much wider pattern. Rather more publicly and with some event-justified jumps.
Scott Sumner
Sep 3 2019 at 8:08pm
I recall that Alex Tabarrok did a post challenging that graph.
Mark Z
Sep 3 2019 at 10:12pm
Yeah, he found that available data indicated the increase was much more modest, with administrative staff increasing as a fraction of healthcare staff by about 50% over the past ~50 years.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/08/are-health-administrators-to-blame.html
Lorenzo from Oz
Sep 11 2019 at 7:08pm
Well, that is useful to know. But the original matter still could be bureaucratic empire building.
mbka
Sep 4 2019 at 12:31am
Scott,
as a hunch I would say, it is a cultural habit of control and nothing more. That being said, these cultural habits are reversible. In Singapore for example, it used to be routine to be asked for your national ID for record keeping at pretty much anything, from your phone provider to registrations for events. Over the past few years, privacy legislation has rolled back all of this significantly and it is now illegal to ask for a lot of data, and where you can ask for ID, you can’t keep the ID data anymore. All the while Singapore hasn’t got any less strict on maintaining public order, so it’s a clear sign that you can maintain order without asking for ID.
I also agree about cashless technology as the greatest future threat to privacy. In China for all I know, controlling payment transactions is already being used for enforcement purposes, e.g. people identified via facial recognition as suspects of some crime have already had their payment ability suspended. I wish I had kept the reference, but I haven’t.
Phil H
Sep 5 2019 at 3:01am
I think this is basically right, and I agree that future people will put up with a lot more intrusion in the form of “anyone could read electronically what you do”; at the same time, they will brook much less moral intrusion of the form “anyone can tell you what kind of person you can sleep with/hair you should have/you should believe”. In many ways identity politics has laid the foundation for social models that are much more high-information and low-interference.
I did disagree with one point, though. Scott says: “While the Chinese government does care about public opinion to some extent, it’s hard to believe that they are under as much pressure as elected governments in Europe and Japan.” I think that might be wrong. The worst that will happen to a democratically elected government is that they will get thrown out of office. The worst that happens to non-democratic government is that they’re overthrown and put up against a wall. The Chinese government has demonstrated repeatedly that it cares very much about certain kinds of public opinion – remember those obsessive statistics on “mass incidents”?
Mark Z
Sep 5 2019 at 11:00am
Good point, I was thinking the same thing; authoritarian governments can in some respects be more worried about what the people think than democratic governments, since as you note, the stakes tend to be higher. For more authoritarian governments, the public raison d’etre for resisting democratization is often security and stability, so it may not be surprising at all for security theater to be more intense than in a democracy.
Thaomas
Sep 5 2019 at 4:40pm
I view the post 9/11 “security” measures largely a desire of politicians to dramatize the “threat” (remember the colors?) first for just self aggrandizement and later to help create an atmosphere for the invasion of Iraq. Of course this played into the hands of professional “security” experts for whom the supply will always expand to fill the self created demand for “security.”
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