A tale of two modern Chinas: omnipotent cities and criminal villages

March 22, 2018 5:36 AM

The Atlantic recently published two very different tales of China: China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech, where Facial-recognition technologies are proliferating, from airports to bathrooms, an article by Rami Niemi on how biometric identification is being used to shame jaywalkers and linking to the still-developing citizen scores (ACLU, 2015). Meanwhile, Murder Villages and Scam Towns are a reality in some rural areas, where crime has become a cottage industry. Robert Foyle Hunwick documents grim examples of corruption far from the big cities, including rural towns where individuals are murdered at work sites but made to look like industrial accidents, and other locals pose as grieving family members to get companies to pay out hush money.
posted by filthy light thief (14 comments total)

In case you’re wondering what the hell a murder village is...

Shisun’s plotters killed migrant miners—staging each man’s death as a mining accident—then posed as grieving family members. Corrupt mine bosses in turn paid these impostor “families” hush money, rather than risk any investigation into working conditions. The scam was grisly but profitable—each death could net as much as $120,000, an unimaginable sum in a country where the average rural family’s annual income is $1,800. The new concrete houses that line the mud-brick village’s main street are a testament to the windfall.

Reminds me of the people convicted of murdering transients in order to sell their bodies to science in 19th c. Britain.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:02 AM on March 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

And so, the invisible hand of the free market finds an optimum use for surplus population.
posted by acb at 6:30 AM on March 22, 2018 [7 favorites]

Is it weird that when I read that one of the options for penalties for jaywalking in Jinang was helping direct traffic for 20 minutes, I thought "Hey, that sounds fun!"?
posted by entity447b at 7:01 AM on March 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

I will make the obvious reference to Black Mirror - Nosedive.

I wonder how long it will be before a scandal breaks out where a high ranking official had one of their misbehaving children scores changed.

Or filters are discovered for powerful people that allow them to basically jaywalk or similar actions without penalty.

Who watches the watchers. Indeed.
posted by KaizenSoze at 7:27 AM on March 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Extensively discussed here recently, of course, with particular reference to invocations of Black Mirror.
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:49 AM on March 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

Coming soon to a western democracy near you!
posted by Thorzdad at 7:58 AM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

Who watches the watchers. Indeed.

It's like the taste of medicine.
-Crosseyed and Painless, Talking Heads, 1980
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:13 AM on March 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

In a report on “gangsterized” villages in Hunan province, Yu Jianrong, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, writes that thugs are often used to keep public order and even collect taxes.

This reminds me of descriptions of warlord-controlled areas of pre-Revolutionary China. A big reason that the revolution took off among peasants was because landlords and thugs had a cozy relationship that made peasant lives extremely unpleasant. Sounds like those conditions are coming back.

I wouldn't bet on another successful rural revolution, though, since industrial China has gotten so much stronger since then.
posted by clawsoon at 11:02 AM on March 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

...a lot of representational social engagement sure goes on in Oakland and Berkeley, last time I was there in 2008...

China is a large, regional nation more like the USofA than I expected...I've learned why BigBird came, and I still search for Oscar...in terms of Liberty and scrutiny, a freer place in most ways than my personal experiences as a US citizen from a heritage whose immigration has no documented evidence-- if one excludes leaving the country because one has to have a fair larger bank account to do so in China than the US.

Extrapolating a scenario and scaling it 7 Chinese Brothers style is the long held tradition of western reports of China. To quote the book: It should die in a fire. Long Live WeChat's servers and may the US not receive what it's got coming in terms of a superiority complex al a J.Holzer's simple admonition: Had You Behaved Nicely The Communists Wouldn't Exist
posted by lazycomputerkids at 12:39 PM on March 22, 2018

Saw this article on the Verge yesterday about how people in China with poor social scores would be banned from public transportation and immediately thought of that Black Mirror episode.
posted by elmay at 12:54 PM on March 22, 2018

It's not like the Black Mirror episode. The scores in Black Mirror were assigned by society at large, an aggregation of ratings from individuals. The point in Black Mirror was that such a system of social status has been extant in reality, just without the quantification and formalization of the fiction.

These scores are assigned by the Communist Party of China.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 5:15 PM on March 22, 2018 [2 favorites]

This Mar 21, 2018 article titled
Nobody Knows Anything About China
Including the Chinese government. seems apropos. (Written by the Asia editor at Foreign Policy.)
posted by Twang at 1:32 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hey! Just came into the thread to see if anyone had posted the “Nobody Knows Anything About China, Including the Chinese Government” link.

The other thing that Palmer has been writing about recently (mostly on twitter) is that the big push for facial recognition going on in China at the moment is going to result in a huge number of false positives (with no way to appeal, of course), partly because of the effects of scaling the system to 1.5 billion people, and partly because the training data for the system was mostly ethnic Uyghur people, and the system will now be used on a population that’s overwhelmingly Han.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 9:10 AM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Accidentally 'like's Tibet remark, loses his job with Marriott.

Damn. What makes China so touchy about all the mistakes it made last century?
posted by Twang at 7:25 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]