LCP-ASSEMBLÉE NATIONALE – TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8 AT 8:30 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY
Settled in Beijing since 2007, the French journalist Sébastien Le Belzic lives with Lulu, his Chinese wife, a dynamic executive who speaks very good French, in an apartment in the north of the city. As soon as they go out on the landing, a surveillance camera fixes them.
In the streets, other cameras, scattered everywhere. Massively installed from the beginning of the 2000s, they make it possible to monitor each trip. In the twenty cities in the world with the most cameras, 18 are Chinese. Nice, the most monitored French city, has one camera for every 130 inhabitants. In Shanghai, it’s one camera for 9 inhabitants…
But in a totalitarian society that since its birth in 1949 has made surveillance of its immense population a trademark, cameras are only a secondary tool compared to the digital applications installed in the hundreds of millions of smartphones of the Chinese citizens. The tech giants have developed systems with QR codes allowing in particular facial recognition and scoring systems for each gesture of daily life.
Point system
The life of Lulu and her compatriots is thus judged by this technology which allows the regime, by mixing all the data, to draw up the digital portrait of each citizen. The logic of global surveillance thus systematically accompanies the changes in Chinese society by relying on the progress of technology.
Until the early 2010s in China, almost everything had to be paid in cash. Now, the cash is gone, everything is in the smartphone. Convenient for users… and for the regime, which can thus analyze daily behavior.
Purchasing habits are noted with a formidable so-called social credit system, introduced by the authorities in 2014. A point system that rewards or punishes citizens according to their behavior: buying healthy food gives points, drinking soda gives you points. remove for example. The more points the citizen has, the freer he is to book such a trip, to take a seat in such a train, to be received in such a hotel, to be treated in such a hospital.
A model of society entirely governed by standards, scores and this disturbing social credit? A private life in open space? Few Chinese citizens struggle against this grip of Big Data on their private lives.
Lulu, filmed in her daily life for a year by her husband, seems rather amused by the fact of accumulating points, smartphone in hand. His angst? Drop below 350 points and become a second-class citizen, deprived of certain rights. But the more time passes, the more the disturbing reality of this digital surveillance is obvious to him: “ They are eating our brains. To train us like robots! “, she says.
My wife has credit, documentary by Sébastien Le Belzic (Fr., 2021, 52 min). Co-production Hikari/LCP National Assembly