ABSTRACT
It is a known fact that Party-led surveillance in socialist China (1949–1978) depended on institutionalized or ritualized human labor. Today, from security checkpoint to global position system, from ID card scanning to fingerprint detection, from pharmaceutical production to genetic profiling, from online market survey to stock exchange tracking, and from selfie-stream to peer-to-peer monitoring, dispersed digital surveillance in everyday life becomes a characteristic constitutive of the relationship to each other, to the natural and social environment, and to the state. In a typical Foucauldian panopticism during the socialist period, fewer powerholders oversee the many subordinates, but post-socialist China sees a regime of synopticism where the many oversee the few with the development of digital surveillance apparatus. Digital surveillance orchestrates an interstitial space between corporate power and individual, public and private, mediation and immediacy, spectacle and reality, which not only subjugates prosumers under various camera-eyes, but also enables their subversion of surveillance power.
