The most common word for privacy, yinsi, didn’t even appear in popular Chinese dictionaries until the mid-1990s. Chinese citizens have accepted national ID cards with biometric chips, “birth permits,” and now social credit rankings because their society has been saturated with surveillance and profiling for decades. For example, the “dang’an” is a wide-ranging personal dossier compiled on hundreds of millions of urban residents from childhood and maintained throughout life. This “Mao-era system for recording the most intimate details of life” is updated by teachers, Communist Party officials, and employers. Citizens have no rights to see its contents, let alone contest them.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1249