This is the fourth article in the four-part (In)Visible China: Understanding Chinese Global Orders series, co-hosted by LSE IDEAS’ China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.
As an architectural historian, I approach questions of ‘Chinese orders’ and ‘invisible China’ first through architectural and spatial terms. How does the state employ architecture and infrastructure to order society—what role do they play in the realisation of political and public orders? How do visible and invisible structures shape public and private spaces in China, and the public and private lives lived within them?
We often think of state architecture as quintessentially visible. From Tiananmen Square to Trafalgar Square to the United States Capitol, the language of state authority is most recognisably expressed through monumentality. Great structures rise above us, articulating authority through their scale, materials, and the contrast between the buildings’ mass and the open space in which they are set, reserved in crowded urban landscapes for the spectacle of the nation.
In contrast to these public statements of authority, much of what constitutes the state’s real power is minimised or hidden from public view. In many cases, this invisibility has a monumentality of its own, one invoked through knowing something is there, even though it cannot be seen. The Chinese Communist Party’s leadership compound at Zhongnanhai, in Beijing, is one such example: although it stands only meters from the capital’s greatest tourist attractions, for the vast majority of Chinese, it remains inaccessible and unknowable behind its wall.
Often, however, the physical imprint of state authority is minimal or robed in mundane structures, while the real architectonics of authority are intangible. This is particularly true for architectures of surveillance, which, in various forms, increasingly shape public space in societies around the world. Herein lies a central paradox of the modern techno-surveillance state: its goal is to render the population and its activities visible, but its means, data and its architecture, is largely invisible.
In his 1998 book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James Scott describes what he calls ‘state simplifications’, processes by which a population is rendered legible to the state at an individual level. From CCTV to national IDs and phone apps, surveillance in its many contemporary forms serves as a means for state simplification, while the digital has made the granularity of the state’s knowledge ever finer.
During COVID, China famously implemented uniquely extensive—many would say draconian—measures for monitoring its population in the name of public health. After isolation measures began to ease, residents of China were required to use their phones to scan themselves in and out of every public space: coming and going from their apartment complexes, getting in and out of taxis, entering and leaving restaurants, museums, and stores. While ostensibly focused on identifying likely contacts between contagious and non-contagious individuals, and thus limiting the spread of illness, the requirements had the not-incidental effect of recording the locations, if not the precise movements—or contacts with other people—of citizens going about their everyday lives.
Most COVID restrictions were greatly eased in response to significant public protests in late 2022, which resulted in the end of the government’s so-called ‘Zero-COVID Policy’. Public resistance found other, more creative outlets in earlier periods, however. One friend described a work-around he devised, in which he took a photograph of the QR code posted at the entrance to his apartment complex. Attaching the photo to his phone case, he scanned it, rather than the proper QR code, every time he entered and left a public place. He thus created a data trail in which he appeared to be coming and going from his home over and over again. In the midst of a regime of hyper-visibility, this friend rendered himself once again invisible.
Many argue that the Chinese government’s enforcement of Zero-COVID measures long after the lifting of pandemic restrictions elsewhere in the world reflected their co-option by the state into broader systems of everyday surveillance. While elements of the regime are no longer in place, they have been supplemented and replaced by other, arguably even more pervasive tracking systems. Use of ‘all-in-one apps’, such as Weixin and Alipay, for payment has now almost entirely replaced cash. Similarly, tickets and other reservations are linked to citizens’ national IDs (or passports, in the case of foreigners),which must be presented in lieu of the ticket when boarding trains, entering museums, or checking into hotels. As such, phones and IDs create a real-time, geo-located record of people’s movement through their purchase histories and everyday activities.
As in the more prominent architectural examples with which this essay opened, the power of this spatial and behavioural ordering is in its simultaneous visibility and invisibility. In the most obvious sense, it is everywhere, completely unapologetic in its ubiquity, as it is nearly impossible to function in contemporary urban China without a mobile phone and government ID. Yet its very mundanity causes such measures to fade towards invisibility, as they are naturalised into the fabric of the everyday.
Even more invisible, of course, is the data infrastructure into which such methods feed. Behind the apps, the ID checks, and the facial scans are mobile networks and data centres that store the information gathered by devices. Little is generally known about data centres, whether in China or elsewhere in the world, sometimes for security reasons, but often simply because of their architectural and functional banality. In the United Kingdom, they are frequently housed in retired telephone exchanges, which by necessity were located at the nodes of communication networks. In China, data are similarly collected and stored bytelecom companies, such as Tencent, defence contractors, like Landasoft, and all-in-one app makers, including Weixin and Alipay. In either case, both data and architectural networks fade into the nondescript background of the contemporary digital and industrial world.
Overseas, concern has been raised about the risk posed by Chinese-made and -owned devices and apps, such as Huawei phones and the social media platform Tiktok, both of which have been at least partially banned by a number of countries, particularly in Euroamerica. While not linked to surveillance, China’s global presence through infrastructural development and resource extraction across theGlobal South, offers a comparable case. Hidden behind the physical and metaphorical hoardings of construction companies with anodyne names, these projects, particularly once completed, belie the transnational influence sought through the Belt Road Initiative.
While surveillance is perhaps most obviously a social form of ordering, it can also be understood in spatial terms, both for the spatiality of its networks—cameras, data centres, cell towers, checkpoints, and the like, which form a techno-geographic overlay on the landscape of the nation—and the way in which it shapes the social experience of the built environment. As such, surveillance functions not through the visibility–invisibility binary, but through the simultaneity of, and tension between, being both visible and invisible.
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This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science.
The main image of Tiananmen Square was provided by the author.
