Chen, D., & Zhan, J. V. (2026). The Social Foundation of Digital Surveillance: A Comparative Analysis of Grassroots Control in China.

During China’s zero-COVID campaign, the state mandated a uniform digital surveillance toolkit, yet grassroots communities produced sharply different control outcomes. Drawing on fieldwork in four communities in one southeast Chinese city, we argue that effective social control requires two steps, information collection and on-ground enforcement, and that the digital mandate creates an inherent constraint at each: informational blind spots and algorithmic rigidity. Digital infrastructure enables the tools but cannot resolve either constraint. Community social network strength is the binding condition, supplying the local intelligence and relational trust that close both. Communities with strong networks succeeded regardless of digital capacity; those without failed.