Jeremy Page and Eva Dou report:
Mao Zedong once hailed Fengqiao in eastern China as a model for “mobilizing the masses” to galvanize Communist Party rule. Under President Xi Jinping, there is an app for that.
Launched in Zhejiang province last year, it offers citizens rewards for information as part of a new government effort to meld old-school totalitarian techniques with 21st century e-commerce, big data and digital surveillance.
There’s just one problem: Many people are wary of using the new technology platform.
[…]
Fengqiao, a township of some 80,000 people in Zhejiang, is being hailed nationwide as a showcase for the platform. Resistance so far has been stiff, principally from citizens who resent being forced to use a surveillance tool, or fear official retribution for voicing their concerns. For some, it smacks of the Mao era, when the party gathered detailed files on citizens and incentivized them to inform on each other.
Read more on Technocracy.
h/t, Joe Cadillic
Perhaps they should use it to report govt employees and police behaving badly?