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Sunday 27 May 2012

Authoritarian? China’s not a patch on Britain

The People’s Republic of China seems to be morphing into a New Labour-style nanny state, says Brendan O’Neill. But at least the Chinese stand up to their regime

But car-drivers aren’t happy. In a nation where, until relatively recently, slogging it by push-bike was the only transport option available to most people, the new car-owning classes aren’t about to give up the feeling of freedom and choice that comes with having your own four wheels. ‘The government needs to build more roads, not ask me for more money,’ said a Beijing hotelier who drives in from the suburbs every day. This sentiment is fairly widespread across the country. Even China Daily, the state-funded English-language newspaper, recently admitted that many motorists consider talk of a congestion charge ‘unreasonable’. In Guangzhou in South China, both academics and motorists have publicly denounced plans for a congestion charge as an ‘unfair extra burden’ on drivers. China, well known for its dearth of democracy and lack of serious public debate, seems to have had a more upfront, testier discussion about congestion charging than we did in London.

Then there are the CCTV cameras, the things that made me feel most at home. Ubiquitous in the UK, they’re now popping up everywhere in Beijing. But where Britain has been filming the public’s every sneeze since the early 1990s, China only got really serious about CCTV from 2003 onwards. Once again, Britain beat the CPC to this authoritarian punch.

On Chang’an Avenue, the vast road that runs past Tiananmen Square, CCTV cameras are dotted on lampposts, peering down on the families, students and young lovers who stream through the square every evening to relax, suck on ice-pops and take photos in front of the big portrait of a miserable-looking Mao. Most people seem unaware of the cameras. ‘I hadn’t noticed them,’ says one young man. Others describe them as ‘unnecessary’. ‘People are only here to hang out,’ says a female student. But China has a long way to go to catch up with Britain, the international pioneer of the use of CCTV cameras to monitor and reprimand the public’s behaviour. There are an estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, or one for every 14 people — in China there are around 2.75 million cameras, or one for every 472,000 of its citizens. Human rights groups were alarmed when China announced this summer that it plans to introduce face-recognition cameras — that is, spycams with special software that can ‘recognise’ individuals and alert the authorities if a fugitive or other dodgy individual is spotted. What kept them? Britain introduced face-recognition cams in 1998. It has since introduced suspicious-behaviour recognition cameras (which pick up ‘behavioural oddities’) and even gait-recognition cameras (which can tell if someone is walking or running in an unusual manner). And as of 2006, there are even speaking CCTV cameras in Britain, through which booming voices tell people to stop loitering or to pick up their litter. One Chinese woman thought I was joking when I told her this.

Visiting Beijing is an eye-opener. It is the capital of a country that is becoming more like Britain with each passing day, but whose people, far from being the brainwashed automatons of too many media depictions of China, could teach us a thing or two about standing up to the nanny state.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked magazine (www.spiked-online.com).

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