In the US, freedom includes easily obtaining guns and having demonstrations with incendiary rhetoric. It is also a place where there are mass shootings, school shootings, random shootings and college presidents who ignore students calling for the genocide of another group. In the US, there have been more than 40,000 murders by gun so far in 2023 (ABC News), but on Dec. 11 a college president lost her job for supporting free speech threats.
What would it take to make a society safe, secure and yet still fulfilled? China has an answer.
China’s surveillance policy and data system is billed as ensuring “the happiness and fulfillment of the people” through “managing social disruptions.” It is based on face recognition and biometrics. Cities are divided into grids and an officer is assigned to each grid. Citizens are in a data system and monitored by cameras.
Everyone has a worthiness ranking based on things like housecleaning and picking up litter. The camera scanners can measure stress levels and potential deviance. One major goal is to identify and interrupt trouble before it ever begins.
However, “Total Trust” shows that two rather sacred professions are at risk in this grand plan. First, defense and human rights lawyers have been arrested en masse. The government and its respective officials are not supposed to be blamed for doing wrong. It seems the government, its policy and its officials, are above the law. Second, journalists must not report on government policy or activity in anything but a supportive, positive way.
“Total Trust” follows three victims of China’s happiness and fulfillment program. Two are lawyers and one is a journalist. Each of the attorneys has a wife and a son. The journalist appears single with a goal to study in UK and then return to China.
In 2015, hundreds of lawyers were arrested, including one in the film. He was kept in jail for five years and tortured on a rack. His legal license was revoked, but now he is allowed to practice property law. However, before hired he must tell his clients that he has been jailed. This info can motivate them to reconsider their decision to employ him, so earning a living has become a challenge.
His friend, Weiping Chang, also a lawyer, was apprehended in 2020. His wife and son were not allowed to visit him due to Covid while he waited for his trial. Then they were banned from seeing him at his trial. He was convicted for inciting subversion of state power for his work in human rights and he has not been seen since.
Jialing Zhang, the director, writes: “It’s not a simple west/east, democracy/autocracy binary. While a lot of eyes are on Chinese tech companies, the responsibilities of international tech giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, etc. are often ignored.”
In both free and controlled societies, how safe a community is really depends on checks and balances as well as who is in charge. Zhang notes: “Across the globe, security services, governments, companies, and hackers are using spyware technologies such as Pegasus [spyware developed in Israel designed for covert entry into mobile phones -BQ] that enable third parties to snoop on devices without detection. These technologies are being used to monitor the activities of citizens, human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, diplomats, businesspeople, and academics.”
“Total Trust” was obviously made at risk to the Chinese citizens participating in this film. It is a precious and important documentary examining the cost of safety and order as well as “happiness and fulfillment.”
Credits
Director: Jialing Zhang
Producers: Knut Jäger and Michael Grotenhoff
Release: Dec. 8, 2023
Official Website, trailer and how to see: https://total-trust.org/
The Impact Campaign for Total Trust is a project by the Interactive Media Foundation gGmbH, which is a non-profit limited liability company located in Berlin, Germany.
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