In the U.S. there’s no surveillance and little assistance for people whose lives start to go off the rails. (Except for unemployment insurance, Medicaid and SNAP which individuals have to apply for.) The ethic is individualism and surveillance is considered a deep form of invasion of privacy. It would be shocking for a neighborhood person to be appointed by the government to interfere with the lives of their neighbors. There are more guns than people. There are hundreds of thousands of homeless people who are basically on their own.
China’s culture is completely different. With 1.25 billion people the Communist Party is taking steps to monitor and solve problems before they become destabilizing.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-surveillance-troubled-people-public-order-6e734df4
China Ups Surveillance of Troubled People to Quell Rising Unrest
Communist Party’s new ‘society work’ agency helps with emotional and economic setbacks while monitoring dissatisfied people
By Chun Han Wong and Shen Lu, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 31, 2025
…
Chinese authorities call a “five-loss individual”: someone with life setbacks, investment failures, family disputes, mental disorders or “emotional imbalance.” …
Chinese leader Xi Jinping uses “society work” as an umbrella term for the Communist Party’s expanding efforts to reach left-behind communities and social castoffs. While helpful to individuals, the program’s overarching goal is to ensure that the problems don’t turn into threats to public order.
In the process, officials are cranking up the machinery of state surveillance to monitor socially fragile or dissatisfied people.
Some top officials at the new society-work department were plucked from state security and the police. Many of its local offices are directly managed by law-enforcement chiefs or placed under their supervision. …
Authorities asked party secretaries of each community to screen for people who have suffered losses, run background checks on them and report their information to a higher-level agency twice a month…Companies have been asked to monitor people deemed to have suffered life setbacks…Authorities are also making use of China’s “grid management” system, an approach dating back to the early 2000s that divides communities into sections of several hundred households, each overseen by a “grid manager” who visits residents regularly and gathers data on their lives, such as contact details, employment status and housing conditions….
A series of violent attacks, including mass stabbings against seemingly random targets and cars ramming into crowds, has gripped national attention and prompted authorities to scramble for ways to address problems. …
Compared with the U.S. and Europe, China’s government provides less in terms of a social safety net, with limited financial support in cases of job losses or health emergencies. … [end quote]
The government is trying to provide a variety of services to insecure people, such as the 200 million (!) gig workers. Everything Chinese involves huge numbers. There’s not an accurate estimate of how many homeless people in China but it’s in the millions.
I am fascinated by Chinese history. Their culture has always been totally indifferent to the value of individual human lives. During the Great Leap Forward, 30 million people died of starvation and Mao Tse-Tung said he didn’t care if half the population died.
It would be interesting and a real change if China began to provide support and services to their people for any reason other than to protect the rulers. Their style of finding troubled people (including surveillance cameras, AI, lists of “social capital,” and neighborhood watch) isn’t American but if it leads to more communal well-being is it a good thing or a bad thing?
This may be on-topic for METAR because a happy country is less likely to become belligerent. I wish their people all the best. They are formidable competitors and our leadership is foolish to turn them into enemies.
Wendy