The global monitoring logic systematically supports the mutations of the Chinese society based on progress in technology.
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Installed in Beijing since 2007, the French journalist Sébastien Le Belzic lives with Lulu, his Chinese wife, dynamic and speaking frames very well French, in a northern apartment of the city. As soon as they come out on the landing, a surveillance camera fixes them.
In the streets, other cameras, disseminated everywhere. Massively installed from the early 2000s, they allow you to monitor each move. In the twenty cities of the world counting the most cameras, 18 are Chinese. Nice, the most monitored French city, has a camera for 130 inhabitants. In Shanghai, it’s a camera for 9 inhabitants …
But in a totalitarian company that since its birth, in 1949, has made surveillance of its huge population a trademark, the cameras are only a secondary tool compared to the digital applications installed in the hundreds of millions of millions of Smartphones of Chinese citizens. Tech giants have developed systems with QR codes, including facial recognition and scoring systems for every gesture of everyday life.
Points system
Lulu’s life and his compatriots is thus judged by this technology that allows the plan, by mixing all the data, to draw up the digital portrait of each citizen. The global monitoring logic systematically supports the mutations of the Chinese society based on the progress of technology.
Until the beginning of 2010 in China, it was necessary to pay any cash in cash. From now on, the cash has disappeared, everything is in the smartphone. Practice for users … and for the diet, which can analyze the behaviors of everyday life.
Purchasing habits are noted with a formidable social credit system, introduced by the authorities in 2014. A system of points that rewards or sanctions citizens according to their behaviors: buying healthy food gives points, drink from the Soda takes you off for example. The more the citizen has points, the free the free to book such a trip, to take a seat in such a train, to be welcomed in such a hotel, to be treated in such a hospital.
A company model entirely governed by standards, scores and this worrying social credit? A privacy in Open Space? Are the Chinese citizens to fight against this Big Data grip on their private lives.
Lulu, filmed in his daily life for a year by her husband, seems rather amused by accumulating points, smartphone in hand. His anguish? Go down below 350 points and become a second zone citizen, deprived of certain rights. But the more time passes, the more disturbing reality of this digital surveillance jumps to him in the eyes: “They are eating the brain. To train us like robots!”, She throws.