Living with the snoops in China
Philip Cunningham says the snoops who doubled as doormen and dorm mates now seem old school
Part of the folklore of being a foreign student in China in the 1980s was that Big Brother was watching, all the time. Very few people had first-hand knowledge, fewer even had proof, but the discomfort, if not fear, was pervasive.
A foreign student in China could easily get the impression that the country was one big spy machine, based on documented tales of abuse that came out of the Cultural Revolution and other score-settling periods, and undocumented, anecdotal tales from more tranquil times - such as "I told my wife on the phone the refrigerator in the hotel room wasn't working and, 10 minutes later, housekeeping came up to fix it"; this sort of story.
The longer one was in China, the more the anecdotal "evidence" piled up, but it was hard to get the big picture. Foreign students would gather in their dorm after curfew and speculate about who the local snoops were: the doorman, or dorm monitor, for example.
My understanding, then, as now, was that the phone was the weak link. To make a call, one had to go through a switchboard, which was as good as a "snitchboard". Public phones were manned by nosy attendants.
Sometimes the blanket of watchfulness was almost edifying, as if the system was benevolent, looking after the public good, protecting people from themselves.
The son of a well-known associate of Mao Zedong would sometimes visit my dorm room at Beijing Normal University to practise English and share a cup of coffee, which I brewed on an electric hot pot I kept hidden, because such appliances were not allowed in the dorm. To reciprocate, he invited me to a private lunch with friends in a suite in the government-run Beijing Hotel, which had a reputation for tight surveillance. As we chatted, our conversation was interrupted by the startling appearance of a rat that scurried across the room.
To see a roomful of former Red Guards trying, and failing, to trap and kill the rat brought to mind Cultural Revolution zealotry. But what really seemed to hark back to that spooky era was the announcement, about a week later, that a nationwide anti-rat campaign was being put into affect. My dorm, like others across the country, was searched, and the hot pot that I kept hidden was confiscated.
