Asian cultures differ from their Western counterparts in many notable ways, including the frequent deployment of shame as a tool to enforce social norms and punish deviancy.
Social cohesion (which they would characterize as social “harmony”) is very much an essential Asian sociopolitical priority. The West, on the other hand, values individual autonomy and individual rights. The objective is to maximize individual sovereignty, regardless of consensus.
Each approach has its own merits. It’s difficult to appreciate the Asian approach to disciplining its citizenry, coming from the West, because it sometimes requires extreme imposition on the individual. This method manifests in sometimes unexpected ways, such as enforcing basic traffic laws against jaywalking.
In the United States, the incentive not to cross the street when the stick figure is red is mostly to avoid legal sanctions like fines meted out by the police. Social convention and/or safety might also be factors, but for most people, those concerns are secondary to the desire not to pay a fine.
In China, the main tool the state uses to disincentivize jaywalking is public shaming, now facilitated by its sprawling digital control grid.
🇨🇳 China facial recognition – if you j-walk you’ll be publicly shamed pic.twitter.com/1AsfgRSAJ6
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When someone crosses a street in Shanghai or Beijing or Shenzhen without following the rules, the CCP blasts their picture onto the big screen. The shaming effect is maximized by setting off a “brake-sounding alarm” to induce panic in the perp and then snap a photo of him or her looking discombobulated.
Via ABC Australia:
Chinese authorities have launched a… surveillance system loaded with facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and a big database to crack down on jaywalking as well as other crimes.
As a result, photographs of pedestrians caught in the act, along with their names and social identification numbers, are now instantly displayed on LED screens installed at Shenzhen road junctions.At some crosswalks, a brake-sounding alarm even goes off if someone walks when the pedestrian light is red, reportedly to alarm the jaywalkers and capture their photo in a moment of panic.
It’s an imperfect technology, as it recently “caught” a woman whose face was plastered on a bus “jaywalking” — make an omelet, break some eggs, etc. Via The Verge:
China’s facial recognition systems are used to catch all types of criminals, from thieves to jaywalkers, in real time. This week, one facial recognition camera publicly shamed a famous business woman for jaywalking after its systems caught her face crossing an intersection. The problem? She was never physically there.
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