Three books explore the nexus of technology, governance, and capitalism in China. The country raises most of its taxes not from individuals but from businesses, ranging from street vendors to large enterprises. In a path-breaking study, Cui shows that China’s tax system does not depend on enterprises to calculate, report, and pay what they owe. Instead, the government maintains tens of thousands of neighborhood offices staffed by an army of local-level “revenue managers”—more than ten percent of China’s civil service—who visit companies to make sure they register and pay. These modern-era tax farmers rarely bother to audit companies’ books. Instead, in pursuit of bonuses for meeting revenue targets, they negotiate each business’s payment in a process Cui calls “atomistic coercion.” The system works: China’s tax bureaucracy captures over 20 percent of the country’s GDP.
The only Chinese bureaucracy with more staff than the tax system is the public security apparatus, consisting of two security ministries, the People’s Armed Police, militia, the armed forces, almost all other government agencies, and a web of informants. High-tech technologies such as facial recognition play a role, but Pei argues that the key to the system’s effectiveness is human labor. Police stations maintain registers of every household; workplace and residential organizations compile information on members; and shop owners, hotels, and printing shops report on customers. As with the tax system, frontline bureaucrats apply the rules in flexible, personalized ways. The police tail, visit, warn, and “invite to tea” so-called “key individuals,” such as religious believers, ethnic minorities, political dissidents, petitioners, ex-convicts, and the mentally ill. Work units put pressure on employees who seem likely to make trouble. Pei believes it is surveillance, and not the oft-cited factors of economic growth, nationalism, and the culture of deference, that is “the key to the survival” of the Chinese communist party-state. Such a robust system could fail only if the government’s revenue managers failed to raise enough tax money to support it.
Lei shows that surveillance in China today goes beyond the security system. Almost every Chinese institution and individual citizen functions under the nonhuman eye of metrics and algorithms promoted by a technology-infatuated state and usually powered by the tools of the new digital economy. Local governments are tasked with dozens of mandates, assessed against a checklist. Officials close factories that don’t meet the standards for their technological modernization. Bureaucrats seeking promotion need to score at least 80 out of 100 points in a multi-item assessment matrix. Software engineers work overtime to meet performance indicators. Migrant workers accumulate points through skill certifications to qualify for urban resident status and get their children into public schools. Food delivery platform workers race to fulfill on-time targets. Such manifestations of “techno-development” and “scientific management” add to the stress of exam-based college admissions, high youth unemployment, and soaring real estate prices, making China perhaps the world’s most intense pressure-cooker society.
