Philip Ivanhoe: How Confucius loses face in China’s new surveillance regime
My central claim is that the new
surveillance culture largely eliminates not only concern with but the
possibility of traditional, Confucian-inspired conceptions of face and related
conceptions of virtue. By focusing on the physical face for identification, and
assessing citizens purely in terms of their perceived benefit or harm to the
state – measured in terms of the Social Credit System (社会信用体系) – the new
surveillance culture fundamentally alters the senses and functions of these
traditional concepts, eliminating both the internal, moral dimension of face as
well as its external, socially constituted dimension. In a very real sense, it
constitutes an ultimate and complete loss of face.
While conceived of and functioning differently in diverse contexts, ‘face’ describes a phenomenon that exists in every human society. Its most basic sense concerns the public presentation and perception of the self. Someone who has face possesses something of positive social value that arises from social approval of a person’s status, action or state of being; someone who loses face has suffered a loss in social value concerning her status, behaviour or state of being. In addition to public perception, ‘face’ has an internal psychological aspect as well: it captures one’s self-image and evaluation of oneself in regard to shared ethical standards and social hierarchies, expectations and norms.
Face is particularly
important in East Asian societies such as China, and found in two related
forms. The first and more popular conception, mianzi (面子), primarily concerns wealth, social status,
position, power and prestige; the second, lian (臉), concerns moral character and behaviour. A
person can have mianzi – eg, status, position, etc – but lack
a corresponding level of lian – eg, be regarded as
morally bad. A complete lack of lian erodes and eventually
undermines one’s mianzi, while someone with great lian will
have considerable mianzi.
In contemporary
Chinese society the question of face has taken a new and disturbing form that
profoundly affects these more traditional, Confucian-inspired conceptions.
China’s rapidly expanding network of surveillance cameras increasingly relies
upon AI-aided facial-recognition technology to achieve much of its primary
mission: to keep track of, record, control and modify the behaviour of its
citizens.... read more:
