Last spring, I went back to China for a book tour that took me to six cities. Entering train stations felt like crossing border control at an international airport — my identity was confirmed not only by someone checking my documents, but also by one of the ubiquitous facial recognition cameras. One day, while a friend was driving me home after a reading in Shanghai, I saw one of them ahead of us on the highway. Well, we can no longer do “bad” things, he said, noticing my discomfort. It was supposed to be a joke, but we fell into a long, dead silence.

Many people in China seem to be happy about the physical security promised by the surveillance network. Our mind-set, long ago, was wired to see safety and freedom as an either-or choice. I remember a conversation I had during my first year in the United States, when I was visiting Chicago. A Chinese student told me he dared not walk alone in the city after 5 p.m. When I told him I’d recently taken a trip to a nearby 7-Eleven at 10 p.m. by myself to get a beer, he was shocked. “Why?” I asked him. “It’s a safe neighborhood.” Still pale, he said, “You only got lucky.”

The disappearance in June 2017 of Yingying Zhang, a young Chinese visiting scholar, from the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois only reinforced this sense of danger everywhere outside China. Her kidnapping by a former graduate student made headlines across the country. The post that got the most shares in my WeChat feeds the week she disappeared was titled, “When you come to the States, leave behind feelings of homegrown safety. ”

The other reason that my people seem not to worry about the violation of their privacy is that they believe they are law-abiding citizens. “Only criminals need to be afraid,” they say. But I’ve heard other stories.

In 2018, Wang Qian, a young single mother from Zhejiang Province, hanged herself after she lost her savings on a peer-to-peer lending platform called PPMiao. In her suicide note, which briefly appeared on social media, she confessed her frustrations: Because she’d been a victim of a financial fraud — and therefore had grievances — she was now considered a threat to public safety and order.

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She said that she, as well as hundreds of other victims who’d tried to stage protests over their treatment, had been beaten by the police. One month before her suicide, investors like her who’d lost their money had planned a rally in Beijing — but only a few managed to show up, because policemen and security guards had gathered on every street corner and at subway stations to check the identity cards of everyone who was nearing Beijing’s financial district. The protest, like most of the other protests in China, was never reported in domestic news outlets.