Foreigners descending on Beijing for the Olympics ought to be curious about China's police. Government claims of foiling terrorist plots may reassure some visitors about their personal security while frightening others. And the leadership's preoccupation with presenting a harmonious image to the world has recently led to widely reported arrests for many other offences that inevitably reveal the extent to which China's stability depends on its omnipresent, but largely invisible, public and secret police.
Yet China is no ordinary police state. Ubiquitous uniformed police and military immediately alert visitors to Pakistan that even countries far freer than China can be a police state. By contrast, except during the Olympics, the Chinese government, despite its obsession with security, gives the tourist, or even foreign residents, few such clues. What impresses visitors to China's cities are gleaming new buildings and people wining, dining and shopping as though there will be no tomorrow. Even many increasingly prosperous Chinese, caught up in their country's remarkable economic progress, lose sight of the generally unobtrusive operation of China's plain-clothes security apparatus.
How efficient is this apparatus? In the 1960s, when Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship was keeping watch over Taiwan, an American congressman visiting the island shattered the conviviality of a dinner given for him by former minister of foreign affairs George Yeh by bluntly asking whether Taiwan was a police state. Yeh, a charming former English literature professor, gave a response that was more urbane than accurate. 'Well, Mr Congressman,' he said, 'you could say that we are a police state, but the fact is we're dreadfully inefficient.'
Because today's mainland Chinese police system, like Chiang's, continues to be veiled in secrecy, especially in security matters, it would be difficult to gauge its efficacy, even if we had better measurement standards. Yet it would be wise for visitors to assume that their movements in public, increasingly monitored by hi-tech equipment bought from American and other foreign companies, as well as by China's more traditional human networks, are closely followed. They should also realise that activities that are usually deemed 'private' in democratic countries receive official scrutiny in China. Although censorship of websites is well known, foreign media have not highlighted surveillance of landlines, mobile phones, faxes, e-mail and other electronic communications. And microphones and cameras hidden in hotel rooms, as well as offices, can record life's most intimate moments.
Yet in such a huge nation, with so many visitors, can a security system staffed by millions be effective? After decades of study and living in and visiting China, I have no doubt that, in matters that are the regime's highest priorities, Big Brother really is watching. This is true not only for alleged terrorists, but also for foreign diplomats, journalists and scholars, and all those who are suspected of spying, organising democratic political parties or unapproved religious groups, seeking freedoms for Tibetan and Muslim minorities, advocating free labour actions, exposing abuses against Aids victims, protesting against land or housing deprivations or birth control excesses and heading environmental pollution demonstrations. Of course, microscopic scrutiny and harsh punishments often extend to any lawyers or legal activists courageous (or foolish?) enough to assist disfavoured groups.
However, even such a comprehensive system cannot give equal attention to all behaviour thought to be 'anti-social'. Police resources are limited, in China as elsewhere. Before the crimes of counter-revolution were replaced by the more conventional-sounding 'endangering state security' and before adultery was eliminated as a crime, I asked a former Fuzhou public security officer why there were rarely prosecutions against adulterers. He said: 'If we prosecuted all the adulterers, we wouldn't have time for the counter-revolutionaries.'