Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China

Dimitrov brings to light the lesser-­known techniques of mass surveillance in Leninist party-states—not the Internet surveillance and facial recognition cameras that are obvious to everyone, but secret information gathering through three institutional channels: the party organization, the state security apparatus, and the internal reports of official media. Comparing China and Soviet-era Bulgaria, with long side glances at other authoritarian regimes, including Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union, he shows in remarkable detail how such governments obsessively collected information on dissenters, not just to target them but to preempt protest by focusing the delivery of economic largesse in restive areas. Regimes can head off some protests, keep some small, and disarm others with concessions—what Dimitrov calls “a low-repression equilibrium”—but only as long as they command sufficient economic resources, which the Bulgarian regime eventually did not. In China, despite its unprecedentedly sophisticated intelligence-gathering systems, small-scale protest is chronic. “Time will tell how long such a system based on routine disruptive contentious episodes can persist,” Dimitrov concludes.