While elderly Chinese women have made foreign headlines for eccentric behavior, from gigs in front of the Louvre to poker games at international airports, for decades the communist establishment has had a more insidious function for this large population of “grandmothers”—monitoring and spying on their fellow citizens.
Just like the network of informants that saturated East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, these women form a large percentage of the “volunteer public order workers” in Beijing. They are mobilized by the Party’s public security agencies and take on roles like patrolling, oral propaganda, guarding buildings, and manning checkpoints.
All these details, and more, were revealed in a recent report by Beijing Youth Daily, which shed light on a surveillance system that is little known outside China.
