The long march to privacy [The Economist] Jan 12th 2006

Asia, China

The long march to privacy

Jan 12th 2006 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

Gradually, China's people are acquiring the right to be left alone—as long as they keep quiet about politics, of course

IT IS surely telling that the characters that make up yinsi, the Chinese word for “privacy”, carry the connotations of illicit secrets and selfish, conspiratorial behaviour. The notion of privacy has not traditionally been valued in China, and proof of that is on display everywhere. The country's public lavatories are often open-plan affairs where locals unabashedly squat elbow-to-elbow as they tend to their business. In hospitals, modesty is often thrown to the wind as treatments are carried out in full view of milling crowds. In the most casual of social interactions, complete strangers think nothing of asking each other details—about their salary, weight and so on—that most westerners would not share even with close friends.

Despite all this, there are signs that the concept of privacy is gaining currency. Echoing the debates now common in western societies, many in China are beginning to bristle at the intrusiveness of nosy employers, data-mining marketers and ubiquitous security cameras.

It is a remarkable development, considering where things stood just a few decades ago. When China's communist rulers came to power in 1949, they set few limits on their freedom to pry into the lives of ordinary people. In the heyday of state control, the Chinese had their employment, housing, health care, food rations and travel all micromanaged by bureaucrats, and their lives were open books. Women of childbearing age even had their menstrual cycles monitored so the state could ensure that those without permission did not get—or remain—pregnant.

The worst of that is now long past. In most respects, people have taken far greater control over their own lives as central planning has begun yielding to the market. Many Orwellian controls remain firmly in place, however, over politics, religion and free expression. Earlier this month, Microsoft acceded to a Chinese request to shut down a blog carried on its MSN service and written by an outspoken government critic, Zhao Jing, who also goes by the pen name An Ti.

In another case, the Chinese government asked for and received from Yahoo!, an internet company, the information it needed to trace the identity of a Chinese internet user, Shi Tao. Mr Shi was arrested in late 2004 and sentenced last April to ten years in prison on charges of revealing secrets by e-mail. Microsoft and Yahoo! have both reaped withering criticism for co-operating in these cases.

For Chinese citizens, it is clear that privacy rights enjoy only the flimsiest of legal protections. China's constitution, postal law, labour law and medical law all make passing mention of privacy concerns, but they are vaguely worded and are all anyway subject to the notoriously arbitrary workings of the Chinese legal system. Yet some pundits reckon that, as attitudes toward privacy continue to change, the law will eventually be strengthened.

One such is Professor Lu Yaohuai, of China's Central South University. He thinks that earlier attitudes toward privacy were shaped largely by traditional living arrangements whereby families of several generations often lived together in small homes. He notes that the average living space for urban Chinese had risen from 3.6 square metres (39 square feet) in 1978 to 11.4 square metres by 2003, and says this increase has played an important role in fostering expectations of privacy within the family, especially among the younger generation. Parents in the past would readily enter a child's room, or read a child's letters, without asking, says Mr Lu, but today are likely to incur the wrath of their privacy-conscious children if they do. A number of academics are going so far as to call openly for stronger privacy laws.

In the public sphere, it is usually technology, rather than nosy parents, that attracts complaints. Though it still lags behind Britain, which leads the world with its 4.2m surveillance cameras, China is installing them at a steady clip. Shanghai alone has 200,000, and plans to double that number within five years. The city of Guangzhou has budgeted $26m to install security and traffic-monitoring cameras on all its main streets. Perhaps most high-tech of all is Beijing, where road cameras, equipped with night-vision capabilities, are paired with radar guns and can snap the number plates of speeding motorists at any time of day or night. Drivers are then notified of their infractions via text messages sent to their mobile phones.

Increasingly sophisticated marketers are also taking advantage of technology to obtain and exploit information about consumers' credit histories and buying habits. And Chinese employers are checking what employees do on the internet.

Several cases, though, have sparked public debate. In one, students have complained about the security cameras installed in the corridors of the girls' dormitories of Renmin University in Beijing. Though school officials insisted they were there for the safety of the students, the girls were concerned about being watched as they went to the showers.

In another well-publicised case, a Shanghai bank worker complained when she lost her job because her employer monitored the steamy messages she had sent her boyfriend from a company computer. Earlier this month some policemen balked at a perceived invasion of their privacy. In an anti-corruption measure, the city of Nanjing has demanded that police officers notify their superiors whenever they marry, divorce, travel abroad or buy a car or flat. The edict has prompted complaints from legal scholars and some police officers, one of whom told state media that he believed his bosses were “intruding too much into my private life”. How times change.