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China Ups Surveillance of Troubled People to Quell Rising Unrest
Aug. 31, 2025 9:00 pm ET
A 68-year-old man in China’s Zhejiang province barged into a local government office last year and declared he couldn’t go on living. His neighbors were bullying him, he claimed, and he threatened to take revenge.
The man had previously served a prison term. He was financially strained, estranged from his family and had frequent conflicts with neighbors. He was what Chinese authorities call a “five-loss individual”: someone with life setbacks, investment failures, family disputes, mental disorders or “emotional imbalance.”
Authorities swung into action. A sprawling new Communist Party agency, the Central Society Work Department, arranged a support plan that delayed some of the man’s debt repayment deadlines and provided counseling and other benefits. Within weeks, the local society-work office declared on social media that the man’s life was “back on track,” without elaborating.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping uses “society work” as an umbrella term for the Communist Party’s expanding efforts to reach left-behind communities and social castoffs. While helpful to individuals, the program’s overarching goal is to ensure that the problems don’t turn into threats to public order.
In the process, officials are cranking up the machinery of state surveillance to monitor socially fragile or dissatisfied people.
Some top officials at the new society-work department were plucked from state security and the police. Many of its local offices are directly managed by law-enforcement chiefs or placed under their supervision.
Authorities asked party secretaries of each community to screen for people who have suffered losses, run background checks on them and report their information to a higher-level agency twice a month, according to a screenshot that appeared to be an order in a work chat group that was posted in December by a Yunnan-based user on China’s Xiaohongshu social-networking platform.
Companies have been asked to monitor people deemed to have suffered life setbacks, according to online directives by local government and law enforcement.
Authorities are also making use of China’s “grid management” system, an approach dating back to the early 2000s that divides communities into sections of several hundred households, each overseen by a “grid manager” who visits residents regularly and gathers data on their lives, such as contact details, employment status and housing conditions. Among other things, they promote government policies, monitor social sentiment and look for possible security threats.
Some grid managers are being asked to track people who are distressed over personal losses, and report issues up the chain before they fester into bigger problems, according to local government and media reports.
The fundamental principle, Xi has said, is to ensure that “small problems don’t leave the village, big problems don’t leave the town, and contradictions don’t get handed to higher ups.”
China’s economy is struggling under the pressure of trade tensions, a busted property market and other challenges. A series of violent attacks, including mass stabbings against seemingly random targets and cars ramming into crowds, has gripped national attention and prompted authorities to scramble for ways to address problems.
For Communist Party supporters, the efforts show how the government proactively responds to individuals’ needs, particularly when times are tough.
For critics of the party, it’s a reminder of its absolute need for social control, and its willingness to use state power to tamp down any signs of unrest.
“It’s not about rescuing the so-called ‘five losses’ at all, it’s about control,” said a man in Shanghai who went bankrupt last year and had his assets frozen after being caught in a legal battle with his former employer.
He said he fears getting labeled as a five-loss individual because it could lead to increased monitoring of his family. Such people “are seen as potential terrorists,” he said.
The Central Society Work Department and the local society-work office in Zhejiang province didn’t respond to requests for comment. The office removed the social-media post about the man it said it helped.
Spreading violence
China Dissent Monitor, a platform run by Washington-based rights advocacy group Freedom House, documented a marked increase in protests last year, mostly driven by economic grievances.
Police disclosures and local-media reports about the stabbings, car-ramming incidents and other attacks that occurred in the past year sometimes described the perpetrators as persons with financial problems, mental health issues or strained family relationships.
In November, 62-year-old Fan Weiqiu killed 35 people by driving a car into a crowd in Zhuhai in the southern province of Guangdong—an outburst that authorities said was spurred by Fan’s frustrations over his failed marriage and the financial settlement in his divorce.
In April, a woman drove a sedan into a crowd in Zhejiang province, killing 14. In May, one person was killed in an apparent shooting at a restaurant in the city of Wuhan—a rare case of gun violence in China.
The government needs to “focus on detecting risks, eliminating hidden dangers, and preventing incidents,” Guangdong society-work officials said days after the November ramming. Authorities sentenced Fan to death and executed him 10 weeks later.
Compared with the U.S. and Europe, China’s government provides less in terms of a social safety net, with limited financial support in cases of job losses or health emergencies.
For a while before Xi came to power, Beijing allowed civil society groups to advocate on and provide some solutions to social and environmental issues, said Holly Snape, a politics lecturer at the University of Glasgow who studies social governance in China. But Xi has clamped down on such groups, suspicious of any activism that is separate from the party.
“There’s a sense that that model failed, and so the party is stepping in,” Snape said, underpinned by a “a deep belief that only the party can organize society.”
Centralized support
Key to the Communist Party’s effort is the Central Society Work Department, created in 2023.
Currently headquartered in central Beijing, minutes from the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, the department helps organize and oversee the efforts of millions of party members, social workers and volunteers who are involved in government projects to engage with and provide support to underprivileged groups.
It runs social-media accounts and an official newspaper, China Society Work Daily, that tout the department’s outreach.
The department’s regional and local branches lead its engagement efforts. In some provinces, they deploy “society-work observers” to act as the party’s “nerve endings” in local communities, where they gather feedback, identify sources of discontent and help find solutions, according to government disclosures.
Officials in the southern city of Zhaoqing took steps to reduce traffic congestion near a village after an observer reported the problem. Another group helped resolve issues with waste removal and drainage.
Sometimes, the job is simply to show residents a good time and remind them the party cares. A district in the eastern city of Hangzhou organized a concert in January ahead of the Lunar New Year to help residents “feel in their hearts the warmth and power that music brings.”
Society-work offices also step in to foster what the party calls “spiritual civilization,” an umbrella term for good morals, civic-mindedness and community spirit.
In the southern province of Guangdong, society-work officials have helped rural residents formulate village rules, including an agreement that mass dances and live broadcasts in public places shouldn’t generate sounds above 70 decibels. Another village agreed to reward good behavior, such as doing volunteer work and caring for the elderly, with cash and commendations, awarding titles like “Virtuous Family” and “Star-ranked Civilized Household.”
These efforts put the party more squarely in charge of matters once left to residents’ committees, which are meant to be semiautonomous groups that managed grassroots affairs with help from local governments.
There is also an increasingly overt state security element behind such efforts.
Local officials in the northwestern county of Weiyuan marked an International Volunteer Day by having volunteers go out to inspect fire-safety equipment and teach residents about recycling—as well as distribute pamphlets about China’s national security law, which sets expansive definitions on threats that include subversion, terrorism and cybercrime.
In the eastern city of Changzhou, society-work representatives teamed up with security officials one Saturday morning to run a “Political and Legal Affairs Milk Tea Stand,” enticing residents with free beverages and imbuing them with lessons on avoiding cults and drug use. “Residents could feel the care and warmth of the rule of law while enjoying a delicious drink,” a local society-work official said on social media.
Authorities have also tapped insights from China’s vast surveillance state, which under Xi has reached ever deeper into citizens’ lives through a sophisticated array of facial-recognition cameras, data-gathering algorithms and social-media monitoring systems meant to detect crime, political dissent and sources of social unrest.
In some cities, such as Beijing, society-work officials are making use of big-data analyses to assess residents’ needs and track social currents. The northwestern city of Lingwu plans to tap artificial intelligence to handle residents’ queries and monitor public sentiment, according to a government document inviting bids for the project.
The society-work department’s top official, Wu Hansheng, a career specialist in political training for party officials and personnel matters, wrote in a newspaper commentary that his agency is seeking new ways to mitigate tensions and maintain stability in a society undergoing rapid and profound change. The goal is to implement Xi’s vision of the “Fengqiao experience for the new era,” Wu said, referring to plans for modernizing a Mao-era approach to social control that relied on ordinary people monitoring each other.
The department’s first-ranked vice minister, Li Wenzhang, previously served as a provincial security czar and a senior official at China’s Ministry of State Security. Another vice minister in the department had been a provincial police chief.
The southwestern province of Sichuan appointed its security czar to lead the region’s society-work department. In the eastern city of Huainan, society-work officials have accompanied local police on “stability maintenance” inspections, visiting hospitals, schools and leisure areas to check on the robustness of their security arrangements.
Local authorities describe the department’s ties with China’s police and security apparatus as an advantage, allowing them to better serve communities. Society-work officials in the port city of Lianyungang touted their ability to deploy a mix of police officers, lawyers and volunteers to run seminars educating the public on the prevention of online scams, workers’ rights and women’s health.
‘Mobile probes’
A major focus of the department’s work has been China’s estimated 200 million gig workers, a group that Beijing sees as vulnerable to economic downturns and a source of growing labor unrest.
The workers typically earn low wages, enjoy little job security and are constantly on the move, making them harder for the party to monitor than factory workers or employees of state-owned companies. Their numbers have grown as more people drift out of other forms of employment.
Strengthening the party’s presence among such groups “is the top priority of society work,” Xi’s chief of staff, Cai Qi, said in November, telling officials to focus on “party building” in new and fast-growing labor communities.
Some local governments are setting up community spaces where gig workers can access conveniences including drinking water, child care and phone-charging points. Called “little bee courier stations” in some areas—a reference to a nickname for delivery drivers—the outposts are similar to “convenience” police stations in the western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, which offer amenities such as wireless internet and first-aid kits while conducting surveillance and enabling a strong security presence.
In Beijing, home to an estimated 330,000 delivery riders and ride-hailing drivers, the municipal society-work department has set up dedicated offices to engage riders and drivers with party membership, providing them with free legal advice, health checks and screenings of “red movies,” which promote Communist Party ideology. Elsewhere, officials are expanding vocational training.
In return for such benefits, gig workers “are encouraged to become part-time grid management workers,” said a local society-work department in the northeastern province of Liaoning. This would “give full play to their role as ‘mobile probes’ in early warning of abnormal situations and collecting social conditions and public opinion.”
“I will take the important instructions of General Secretary Xi Jinping as a guide” and “continue to carry forward the ‘little bees’ of couriers who are dedicated to their jobs,” Yang Shuang, a delivery rider in Shaanxi province, told a state-run newspaper.
Similar programs in Shanghai have offered free haircuts and sewing services to gig workers, notes Zhang Yueting, a University of Tokyo researcher who studies Chinese grassroots governance.
“It is clear these are care projects designed for vulnerable groups,” Zhang said. “It can also be said that care is a form of social stability maintenance.”
A Beijing blogger who initially considered embracing the five-loss label, thinking the government might help him, became more skeptical after he learned authorities were surveilling such people and viewing them as sources of social instability. “This approach addresses the victims of problems rather than the problems themselves,” the blogger wrote.
A blogger in Guangdong province also criticized the monitoring. “The current governance logic doesn’t focus on what kind of help you need,” the blogger wrote on the WeChat social-media app. “Instead, it prioritizes ensuring that you do not harm society.”
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
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