In October 1935, in the cold and desolate northwest wasteland, a group of cadres were forced into pits and buried alive. Xi Jinping’s biological father, Xi Zhongxun, was also among those buried alive, enduring the ordeal along with the rest until the Central Red Army fled to Shaanbei. Xi Zhongxun recalled, “Only four days late, and I would have been gone. Because the first order of the Central Red Army was not to attack but to ‘stop killing.'”
However, not everyone was as fortunate. Around the same time, in the Soviet Area of Futian, Jiangxi, over 70,000 Red Army soldiers and local officials were identified as “AB Group” and faced execution. It was later admitted by the CCP that among the over 70,000 unjustly killed, not a single person was actually part of the real “AB Group.”
These two cases, a matter of life and death, were solely dependent on the political judgments and actions of the superiors.
This is precisely the institutional Achilles’ heel that the Epoch Times’ exclusive report “A Study of the Structure of the CCP’s Security Apparatus: The Frontline Operational Units of Social Control” has hit upon: ninety years have passed, and the bloodthirsty genes solidified during the rectification movements have never dissipated. They have merely been cloaked in modern administrative terms such as “social stability,” “public security construction,” and “social governance,” continuing to parasitize the daily lives of the Chinese people like ghosts.
A core shocking finding of the report is that the true control of the CCP lies not in the rosters of central agencies but is hidden on the streets, campuses, police stations of China, and even behind the mobile phone software you use daily. This system infinitely generalizes political security, weaving every move of ordinary citizens into a round-the-clock, preventive surveillance network.
The Epoch Times is about to release this groundbreaking research report, providing a panoramic view of the opaque operations through which the CCP maintains its rule—a vast “security infrastructure” firmly controlled by the Party, spread throughout the country. The report profoundly reveals how the totalitarian system gradually devours individual freedoms, marking a milestone in understanding and countering the global infiltration of the CCP and gaining insight into its digital authoritarian operational logic, thus holding high strategic significance and reference value for safeguarding free societies.
The report indicates that after 1989, the CCP’s “social stability” approach underwent a qualitative shift: the methods transitioned from “post-event disposal” to comprehensive “pre-event prevention.”
This constitutes an unprecedented form of preventive authoritarian logic. Under this system, key individuals, groups, and regions are managed in a tiered manner. Even before a person violates any law, as soon as public authority detects so-called “clues,” a chain of measures is initiated, including summons, admonishments, travel restrictions, and coordination between units and communities for surveillance.
Fundamentally, this system represents a “pre-deprivation of civil liberties.” Public authority blatantly circumvents judicial processes to restrict freedom of movement in advance. This is not law enforcement but rather a “lawful” form of robbery of personal freedom—it expropriates the legal living space of citizens before they are proven guilty.
This parallels the logic of the past Soviet rectification movements of “better to wrongly kill than to let go” and “presume guilt and then investigate further,” only now with a refined administrative and bureaucratic shell.
The report’s disclosed data scale is remarkably impactful. Citing estimates by scholar Pei Minxin based on regional yearbooks and leaked information, the total number of CCP’s “key population” and “key personnel” covers 0.5% to 0.9% of the national population, totaling 7 to 12 million individuals. However, the data structure reveals that only 1% to 4% of the total “key personnel” listed are explicitly designated as “political suspects,” with the vast majority being ordinary criminal and public safety control subjects.
This proportional structure is highly deceptive and serves as a disguise. The CCP deliberately blends a tiny number of political control subjects into the vast base of ordinary public security control. This method of “political control rendered as public security” allows the totalitarian network to operate long-term without arousing societal alarm.
This report presents the most academically substantial aspect by not simplifying “key personnel” as political prisoners but precisely pointing out that the CCP’s “ubiquitous public security” system’s most terrifying aspect is its ability to inject political judgments into routine security categorizations without judicial verification, arbitrarily extending or shortening the surveillance list.
The report reveals that the CCP’s party-state system maintains a grassroots informant network controlled by up to 10 to 15 million individuals, covering about 0.7% to 1% of the total population.
Contrasting historical data, during the Cold War era, East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, had an average of one full-time agent for every 165 citizens. In comparison, the CCP system’s national security forces provide only one agent for every 20,000 people.
This comparison reveals an even more alarming fact—the CCP does not need to replicate a bulky and expensive professional secret police apparatus like the Soviet Union did; instead, it outsources surveillance costs as “socialized outsourcing” to community workers, unit security guards, school counselors, religious venue managers, and regular neighbors in a manner that achieves or even surpasses the socio-political penetration density of the Stasi.
Simultaneously, the report truthfully points out the high rarity of this “human network.” Approximately 60% of informants gather hardly any information, with just about 25% of collected data being reported, and the majority of it relating to public sentiments rather than specific “hostile intent.” The relationship between these informants and the system is not a singular model—it is not solely voluntary reporting nor entirely mandated participation, but a form of “loyalty agreement” existing at the intersection of political mobilization, administrative pressure, and personal interests—a hidden contractual obligation for individuals to cooperate, betray the privacy of others for policy indulgence or minor benefits, and bear the implicit duty to express opinions when required.
The CCP precisely seeks this “low-cost, high-coverage” distributed surveillance. The societal collective uncertainty of not knowing who is reporting or when one will be targeted serves as the fundamental psychological tool that compels Chinese citizens to engage in self-censorship and self-restraint, breaking through the psychological barriers constructed by the CCP using low-cost uncertainties.
How does high technology descend into a tool for CCP rule? The report introduces the concept of “cross-system interfaces,” accurately capturing the qualitative shift in the CCP’s control model in the digital age.
The CCP does not need to directly transfer all citizens’ private data into public security bureaus but instead “secures” civilian commercial infrastructure by transforming it into a form of “security infrastructure” through legal frameworks, accountability systems, and specialized mechanisms that public security agencies, national security entities, and intelligence centers can access at any time. Telecommunications operators and internet platforms (such as Taobao, Meituan, WeChat, QQ, etc.), outwardly independent commercial entities, have essentially become external “interfaces” that can be accessed at will by public security cyber-security and national security, and state security information centers.
This implies that every aspect of a Chinese citizen’s daily life, such as travel ticket purchases, hotel accommodations, online consumption, instant messaging, and logistics deliveries, which usually function as business logs, triggers algorithms that amalgamate big data layers with AI algorithms from the “synthetic operation centers,” generating portraits of targets for local police stations and special patrol officers to issue arrests.
This predictive policing includes preemptively integrating behaviors that have not yet occurred, gatherings that have not yet formed, and expressions that have not yet been enacted into a risk model. Religious congregations, student gatherings, stays at sensitive locations, inter-regional movements—all are tagged as anomalous signals by algorithms. This finding of the report affirms that technology not only fails to advance the rights and freedoms of the Chinese people but significantly diminishes the threshold for authoritarian intervention.
Corporate compliance departments, school security offices, platform risk control systems, often unaware or semi-aware, have become peripheral nodes of this comprehensive surveillance and perception network. Daily functions serving commercial, educational, and platform governance purposes have silently been integrated into the political control system.
External observers often liken the CCP’s Ministry of State Security to the “Chinese CIA.” However, the report accurately points out a significant blind spot: the CIA lacks internal political security functions, and the FBI does not possess residential registration or grid management authorities, whereas the CCP’s national security agencies encompass foreign intelligence, internal political security, counter-espionage enforcement, and grassroots governance under one umbrella.
Citing publicly available materials from Western judicial cases and sanctions, the report specifically names how local CCP national security bureaus exploit front companies, university resources, and marketized technical personnel to organize overseas network attacks:
Furthermore, the report firmly outlines strict boundaries regarding the recent internationally stirring “i-Soon Information,” categorizing it as a “commercial network capability provider for public security, national security, and other political/legal/intelligence clients” rather than being directly contracted by the Ministry of State Security.
This fully unveils the murky ecological shadows of local national security systems, revealing the chaotic and highly expansive network outsourcing embedded in it, with contractors serving multiple secret agencies for commercial interests.
Moreover, the report calls out the three major public contact platforms that the national security system has long relied on:
Epoch Times commentator Li Linyi remarked, “From the Central Special Branch, the Soviet Area Political Security Bureau, the Yan’an Social Department, to post-establishment agencies such as the Ministry of Public Security and the National Security Commission, the names of the CCP’s security institutions may change, but the essential nature of ‘political power above all, political security as the top priority, and preventive control as the prioritization’ has never changed. The bloodthirsty logic of ‘better wrong than let go’ from the past is now packaged in gentler party culture terms like ‘public security construction’ and ‘social governance’ and continues to erode the freedom of the Chinese people.”
Li Linyi believes that this report serves as a warning to Western governments and enterprises: the actual primary actors in overseas hacking and espionage activities are not the ministry departments in Beijing but the hidden contractors at the grassroots “interface” of local national security bureaus and industrial networks, demanding a defense strategy that vigilantly tracks and monitors these localized execution chains.
For overseas Chinese individuals, only by understanding how daily civilian data gets transformed into surveillance directives through local “interfaces” can one truly break through the subconscious self-censorship psychological cues, smashing through the spiritual barriers of uncertainty woven by the CCP using low-cost uncertainties.
(The Epoch Times will unveil in subsequent serial reports a profound analysis of this exclusive report’s impact on local national security systems, the public security technical surveillance network, and the human involvement architecture.)