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How Confucius loses face in China’s new surveillance regime | Aeon Ideas

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How China’s new state surveillance culture is changing the country’s centuries-old Confucian-inspired understanding of ‘face’

A screen demonstrates facial-recognition technology at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China, on Thursday 29 August 2019. Photo by Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images While conceived of and functioning differently in diverse contexts, ‘face’ describes a phenomenon that exists in every human society. Its most basic sense concerns the public presentation and perception of the self. Someone who has face possesses something of positive social value that arises from social approval of a person’s status, action or state of being; someone who loses face has…

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