Paper long abstract:

The fight against Covid-19 has further accelerated China’s testing and development of pre-existing smart city cameras. Already prior to the pandemic, Chinese tech companies such as Huawei, Dahua and DJI were known for promoting and selling their high-resolution cameras under the banner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to Central Asia. Chinese CCTV cameras, therefore, form an integral element of local regimes’ response to Covid-19. Whereas face masks might disappear, the fear among security scholars is that Chinese smart cameras with facial recognition are not only here to stay, but even set to expand and become part of everyday law enforcement and governmental practices in post-pandemic Central Asia.

There is no research so far assessing the extent to which the current pandemic is fueling the spread of Chinese smart cameras across Central Asia nor any studies into the wider Central Asian public’s attitudes towards CCTV cameras in public places. My study is designed to address these voids for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Methodologically, the study will be carried out through the combined use of the WVS 7 survey data, as well as an analysis of government and local news reports on smart cameras. In investigating whether Central Asian people’s confidence in the police, fear of crime or security concerns – the independent variables – affect their support for CCTV cameras in public spaces – the dependent variable – my paper seeks to illustrate what the normalization of mass surveillance promoted by the BRI’s has come to mean for individual’s privacy and security.