Hold Your Breath, China

neighborhood committee had been a dynamic ‘watchdog’ for the Party authorities during the Mao period, when the word yinsi – privacy – did not exactly exist in the Chinese language. If anything, yinsi was totally negative, meaning something done in secret from the surveillance of the ‘revolutionary people’. So the committee could have done everything in those years in the name of the ‘class struggle’, spying on and suspecting anyone as a possible ‘class enemy’. In recent years, however, it was no longer that easy for a committee member to barge into a resident’s home without a justifiable reason.