Presented February 10, 2006 at the
7th Annual Privacy and Security Conference
Victoria Conference Center, Victoria, B.C.,
Introduction: I am Jeffrey Barlow, Director of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies, Pacific University, Oregon, USA . Also I am the Matsushita Chair of East Asian and International Studies at Pacific. I have lived in Chinese cultural sphere for more than six years, enjoyed two Fulbright grants, and spend 4-6 weeks annually in China working in Shanghai area, oddly, teaching Chinese history to Chinese students.
In this presentation I hope to do three things:
1) Discuss root Chinese values RE privacy and security
2) Discuss the present state of affairs with regard to Chinese people and foreigners working in China or with Chinese people.
3) Make suggestions for coping with problems presented by the first two issues.
1) Root Chinese Values RE Privacy and Security 1
I believe that throughout Chinese history, including into the present, Chinese societies, traditional and modern, have been molded by a series of core values and related institutions. These social systems have all been, by world standards, extremely hierarchical. The security of the state and the population overrides all concerns for privacy, which surely is the most individual of values. Without privacy, the boundary between individuals breaks down and all become a sort of social collective. This describes Chinese society for well over two thousand years.
In Chinese society, governed by Confucianism, high authority actors accept responsibility for behavior of low authority actors. To paraphrase a statement by Confucius: "If a high authority actor calls upon a low authority actor to do something, he goes and does it."
It was taken for granted in this society that individuality, freedom, spontaneity, essentially all individual values, were at least potentially inimical to good social order. It was the responsibility of high authority individuals to constantly monitor and supervise knowledge and the transmission of information.
Low authority persons accept this state of affairs as natural and even "good." This order provides stability and continuity in a precariously balanced economic system constantly on verge of collapse from 14 th century well into 20 th century.
Collapses were frequently catastrophic because intensive Chinese style agriculture, characteristically wet-rice cultivation, depends on a highly interdependent social and political system.
Foreign visitors in the 18th century talked about traveling for days and seeing all bark gnawed off trees as high as a human being could reach. One social institution was to exchange your child during a prolonged famine, who would certainly die of malnutrition, with your neighbor's child, equally doomed. Each family ate the other family's child, hoping to save older children so families might somehow survive. As late as 1958 millions died in famine.
This system also had great internal mobility and waslargely meritocratic within limits dictated by socioeconomic resources, which were distributed very inequitably. But decade after decade, century after century the finest minds and most ambitious personalities aspired to compete in Confucian national exams to become high authority figures.
The system was also self-balancing and self-replicating to an incredible degree. At the top of the system was an hereditary aristocracy that was given tremendous power and freedom in all things in return for accepting responsibility for central direction and control, ideally continually advised by the Confucisn meritocrats who had advanced to the top of the system.
This system was so successful that it was deliberately emulated by nearly all of its neighbors who altered it to fit their own cultures and histories but basically accepted it. Chinese Confucianism informed core values in China , Vietnam , Japan , and Korea for well over a thousand years.
So in my talk today, although the specifics refer always to the People's Republic of China , I believe these statements to be applicable also, in descending order, to Taiwan , Vietnam , Japan , and Korea .
2) The Current State of Affairs with Regard to Privacy and Security.
Confucianism was best preserved on Taiwan until recently. Confucianism as a formal system has often been assumed to be extinct in its homeland, Mainland China . However, this is simply not true. Many so-called Communist practices are thinly veiled Confucian practices; Communist cadre very like Confucian scholars; about the same percentage of population rises into bureaucracy; both are intellectual academic, textual traditions; both are meritocratic and extremely competitive.
The Chinese now find themselves searching for a core value system as Marxism continues to seem increasingly irrelevant in a system characterized as "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," but one increasingly dominated by the market and highly dependent upon both foreign markets and foreign capital. They are turning once again to Confucianism.
It was recently announced that the government would create one hundred "Confucian Colleges" to research and by implication, inculcate, Confucian knowledge. I myself spend 4-6 weeks a year in part teaching Confucianism in China because the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution drove it so far underground that it has not been formally studied or taught for almost forty years----almost two generations.
The renewed state sponsorship of Confucianism is, of course, not simply a coincidence: the core needs of the Chinese system remain security and stability, and the system continually evolves to meet them.
With regard to privacy and security, things changed very little during the 19 th -20 th century transition from Confucianism to Communism, and the change to Communism with Confucian characteristics will not be much of a change either.
During all times the security of the state was assumed to be paramount, though it was sometimes believed that the state was no more than a higher level of the Confucian family and that family values should in fact be dominant ones.
There is no expectation of privacy except at the very highest levels in Chinese society, where elites, it is sometimes argued, don't behave that differently than did imperial elites, unbridled by all restraints.
Anybody's business is everybody's business and every means of gathering information from social pressures to electronic eavesdropping on even friends and colleagues is considered acceptable. International electronic communications are, of course, of special interest as in the contemporary United States where there now seem to be de facto no restraints upon the monitoring of communications.
The Chinese will certainly modernize all systems of establishing, authenticating, and tracking both individual identities, and communications between them, should they consider it cost effective to do so. However, must usually, Chinese governments have felt that a more efficient mode of policing was simply to ignore individual transgressions until they become sufficiently egregious to come to the attention of the state. Then they are repressed with a deliberately heavy hand, so as to discourage additional violators, a policy called "Killing the Chicken to Frighten the Monkeys."
It has been clear for sometime that Western search engines and international corporations will cooperate in this process. Witness the most recent case of a Chinese blogger, Zhao Jing (AKA Michael An Ti) who revealed insider information on the activities of government bureaus. Microsoft shut down his web site at the request of the Chinese Government.
Nor, I would argue, is it "wrong" in some absolute sense either for the Chinese government to monitor and suppress dissent or for foreigners with substantial economic or political interests to abet them in doing so. Each state or culture is certainly going to impose its own historically derived practices with regard to privacy and security. And until we have largely accepted, and perhaps codified in some way, a set of widely accepted global humanitarian values, few can afford to cast the first stone, especially not a citizen like myself of the increasingly surveillance oriented United States of America
3) Given this present state of affairs, then, what are coping mechanisms?
Here I do not intend to advance solutions...there are none. Today's system works in much same way as it always did except media have changed, and so have some elements of core organizational practices.
While working in China or even at a distance with Chinese people a high degree of surveillance must always be assumed to be present. This seems Bondsian, overly dramatic, but in almost 30 years of working at China I have frequently had direct proof of eavesdropping and data interception, to the point where I now expect it.
In a previous position, when I first entered the apartment provided to me and turned on the lights in the bathroom, the telephone rang. I amused myself for a few moments playing the "East is Red" on the phone, as best I could, given that I had only a limited scale with which to perform, then called the head of the foreign affairs department and told him that his security guys had apparently cross-connected the powered microphone in the telephone to the bathroom electrical circuit. He thanked me and sent a team right over and we had it all running smoothly within an hour or so.
All telephone messages and many apartments---including bedrooms--- are bugged with audio-listening devices as common and accepted practice. However, this can actually work to your advantage once you know it is going on.
Monitoring provides a separate and deniable channel of communication to those above you. A colleague of mine recently got a nice raise by telling his family that unfortunately he could not afford to sign a new contract and they would be leaving China . My son once learned to manipulate the dinner menu in our apartment by lauding or complaining loudly about certain dishes at dinner table.
Once you recognize that your bedroom is bugged it can either be inhibiting or rather stimulating, I am told. A friend of mine advises that you ask yourself what Jim Carrey or Robin Williams would do under such circumstances and act accordingly. The Chinese have long believed that all foreigners are over-sexed---act out, my friend advises, and you will be surprised at the new friends you will make.
On a more serious note, all digital packets traveling over common carriers are potentially vulnerable to highly systematic and sophisticated surveillance. The evidence as well as my personal experience indicates, these are not always or even often read, but the potential is always there.
Chat rooms, and increasingly networked games, are monitored by "Big Momma"---editors who can alter text, block access, or ban participation.
International communications are monitored by Carnivore like devices---a technology pioneered by the United States it should be noted and deployed against even allies, for commercial as well as security purposes--- computers which search for text or data strings that might be associated with political commentary: names of leaders, policies, etc.
If at any point you draw attention to yourself, your IP will feed your data into dedicated machines that will copy, scan, and delay all communications.
But the most common and most effective form of monitoring is, as always, self-monitoring. Potential offenses are not clearly spelled out, necessitating constant self-processing that makes for very inhibited communications.
In China, as a result most common communications are about food, fashion, and personal relationships. Thinly veiled social commentary is sometimes dared but always elliptical and never suggests actions---much like political discourse in the traditional society that was often carried on in poetry and art.
And as is in the old society, to not report deviant behavior is itself a sort of deviance. Anytime two people talk, each must worry that the other will report, making each examine the wisdom of reporting first, or more likely, quickly changing the topic.
So what do Chinese people and foreigners dealing with them do? As is increasingly true all over the world, assume that your communications are or might be monitored.
Clearly this is more likely to be true in China than almost anyplace else except the United States . Americans authorities, driven by their own conception of national security needs, have an equal desire to monitor and greatly superior ability to do so.
Americans may be somewhat more restrained by law than is the Chinese state, but even that is apparently changing. But the Chinese, for their part, have an even greater desire to monitor commercial information. It is clear that perhaps the most important aspect of joint commercial ventures to the Chinese is not only immediate profits but also long-term knowledge transfer.
Nothing mission critical can be exposed to common carrier electronic communications. Even private channels, leased lines, etc., should be presumed to be unsafe. The safest mode of communication is still the physical transfer of encoded information, as has been true for centuries.
But even your open communications flows must be constantly monitored: Make sure that critical messages are in fact getting out and being received. Triple redundancy is not too much...three messages to three different boxes at three different servers.
Work out internal devices for signaling sequence and number of messages. You should periodically exchange lists of messages sent and messages received. This provides for a sort of organizational back-up and an early warning of possible disrupts.
I am not sure that encryption is much of a defense. It islikely to cause trouble at both ends as it passes through firewalls in China and any other country. At the very least encoding will cause delays and many messages will never get through. At the Berglund Center we are studying this issue at present.
At an informal, even social level, do not put Chinese friends or employees at hazard by placing them in a position where they may feel pressure to report before somebody else does. Never be critical of party or governmental or joint venture partner's practices in front of groups larger than one.
Conclusion:
Above all, always assume that everybody knows everything that you are doing, writing, and saying. Do not delude yourself that you have somehow eluded surveillance. No social practices or technological approaches are proof against determined opponents with unlimited resources, and, in the case of the Chinese, with several thousand years of experience.
This may seem a very depressing message. It need not be. I have worked in China , Vietnam , or Taiwan since 1965. I have been in residence, living in one or the other for more than six years. Two of my three children spoke Chinese before English. I really like and enjoy the culture, and moreover, find that as it steadily improves in at least material comforts and political transparency, my own country steadily deteriorates.
The Crossover point probably will not come in my lifetime, but I am reasonably certain my children will see it. So, the things you learn working in or with Asia will also become increasingly valuable in all other countries.
1 Please note that I have worked in a wide variety of Chinese institutions, from Guangxi on the Vietnam border in the south toe my current post in coastal central China , and in a number of institutions in Taiwan as well. My current position is as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wenzhou Medical College in Wenzhou , in the Shanghai region of China . None of the examples mentioned here refer in any way to my experience at Wenzhou Medical College , nor to the conditions there. It is an extremely modern and open institution, which is the reason that I am working there, of course.
