China's bugged taxis and the right to privacy

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Peter Foster moved to Beijing in March 2009. He was formerly the Daily Telegraph's South Asia Correspondent based New Delhi from 2004-2008. He is married with three children.

By Peter Foster World
September 22nd, 2010

A taxi in Beijing (Photo: Getty)

Apologies for the absenteeism of late, I’ve been away travelling in Cambodia and southern China on two longer-term projects.

Back in Beijing an article in the Global Times about ‘bugging’ – i.e. the installation of voice and video recorders – in taxis in Chongqing, Xi’an, Beijing and Wuhu immediately caught my eye this morning.

Not so much for the fact itself – as the piece neatly points out, quoting a British resident of Beijing, we Brits are no strangers to surveillance by the state – but for the reaction of ordinary Chinese people to the decision.

“It makes me uncomfortable. I feel like I’m being watched all the time,” local resident Han Yun told China’s Xinhua news agency, echoing a common thread in the cities concerned that the cameras are a violation of privacy.

Global Times, rather melodramatically for my money, quotes a 24-year-old Beijing civil servant as saying that he doesn’t say a word in the taxi – not to the driver, his wife or his mobile phone – for fear of revealing something he shouldn’t.

“It feels like I’m under surveillance when I’m inside the taxi. There is always a device recording what I’m saying,” he says, “I choose to stay silent because I do not want to reveal any personal information in the taxi.”

The reactions speak of a growing awareness about individual rights in China which, as much as any reform in the law itself, is forcing the state to change its behavior.

There was another of example in the papers only last week.

China is currently preparing for a census which is causing similar ripples because of people being wary of disclosing financial information (ie just how many houses they own thanks to their grey and black income) or whether they have more children than they should under the one child policy.

One official recently reported that he’d had a terrible time getting people to sign the forms, observing that the last time China did a census, officials just walked into people’s houses and demanded to see their papers.

Not any more, he said, (ruefully, perhaps) – “people know their rights”.

Of course, ‘rights’ is a tricky concept in China, since the law is weak and the Party can (and frequently does) over-rule constitutional and legal rights in the name of protecting ‘social harmony’ or its fundamental right to rule, which in its view, comes down to the same thing.

In theory, according to Feng Yujun, a law professor at the Renmin University of China quoted by Global Times, Chinese citizens actually don’t have any ‘right to privacy’ – especially when it conflicts with the ‘public’ interest (or Party interest, again the same thing).

“The concept of privacy was not written into the general provisions of the civil law when it was issued in 1986,” he said, “which makes it hard for the public to protect their privacy through the legal process.”

In practice, however China’s citizens do increasingly have and demand rights.

They are not codified in law (which is the problem in cases of last resort) but born out of a process of pushing and pulling that is constantly going on between the citizens and the government with the citizens winning ground for themselves inch by inch.

Even without the law to support them, China citizens know that the governing authorities are conscious of how far people are prepared to tolerate having their rights ignored or abused, and they use that knowledge collectively to gradually assume greater rights to themselves.

You read, and I often write, about the arbitrary abuse of rights in China by the police, by corrupt officials, by government and the courts but these need to be seen as markers along a long, winding road that is – even with periodic switchbacks and U-turns – heading in the general direction of greater freedom.

Right. I’m off to eat a mooncake, so here’s wishing everyone a happy mid-Autumn Festival.