Paper short abstract:

In investigating whether Central Asian people's privacy concerns affects their approval of CCTV cameras in public spaces, I seek to illustrate what the normalization of CCTV, intensified by China's DSR, has come to mean for individuals in Central Asia.

Paper long abstract:

Already prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese technology companies were known for promoting and selling their closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems to Central Asian countries under the banner of China's Digital Silk Road (DSR). As a result, Chinese technology firms are by far the most dominant suppliers of CCTV equipment in the region. While video cameras, whether of Chinese origin or not, are useful for efforts to combat the virus, recent studies have paid little attention to the wider Central Asian public's attitude toward their presence. This article is designed to fill this gap with regard to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. To investigate whether Central Asian people's privacy concerns - the independent variable - affects their approval of CCTV cameras in public spaces - the dependent variable - the World Values Survey Wave 7 (Haerpfer et al. 2022) country data sets for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan was used to run several regression analyses in R.