Channels, Fall 2018

Page 128 Warder • Eyes on the Money global system. This coveted economic, and thereby global, status is indeed the subject of each state’s efforts for security through the implementation of technology. The U.S. and Chinese governments operate a developed surveillance state, using a myriad of technological components and methods to exert greater control and ensure greater protection upon their constituent economies. The expanse of specific methods utilized by the two powers in this regard are indeed vast, including the broad range of internet, communications, data, and physical activity monitoring capabilities continuously being developed. The governmental purpose of maintaining an economic power base, however, manifests itself in a specific aspect of the broad range of government surveillance practices, that being closed-circuit television (CCTV) networks implemented in urban centers that provide comprehensive observation throughout areas of concentrated population. CCTV networks serve as means for governmental agencies and enforcers to achieve greater levels of control through increased awareness, monitoring, and tracking capabilities. The existence of such networks raises questions in relation to the formation and utilization of such and how they correlate with policies purposed towards maintaining the national economic power base. For means of comparison, the development of modern CCTV surveillance practices can be juxtaposed in two opposing contexts, those being the traditionally more republicanized and democratic constitutional republic of the USA and the authoritarian state of the PRC. These two countries, while exhibiting a dichotomy in national political function, are very similar in the fact that the two combine to demonstrate a key motivating factor that drives the development of their respective modern surveillance states. The USA and the PRC, as the first and second largest economies in the world, and thereby the two most singularly powerful states in existence, greatly prioritize continued economic integrity and growth as a basis for their power. This research will posit that the surveillance states of the USA and the PRC are demonstrative of a distinctly realist, power-based approach to international relations. It will be conducted through case-study examination of the political economies of the USA and the PRC as they relate to each state’s developing urban CCTV networks, which in turn function as a means of protecting and nurturing national economic centers, The examination of each of the aforementioned states cannot be undertaken in a fully comprehensive manner, and so this paper will approach such an undertaking by means of addressing two specific research questions in reference to each respective case. The first question this research will seek to address is how each state demonstrates generally realist policies in the process of securing economic centers and the overall protection of its economy. Examining this facet of securitization then transitions the discussion into the more specific second question, how the use of CCTV contributes to the security and functionality of major economic centers in each state. Literature Review International Relations Theory In order to properly engage in an examination of how the world’s economic superpowers demonstrate similar approaches to international relations in the protection of their respective urban centers, it is necessary to further delineate what those approaches are. International relations scholars Andrew Moravcsik and John Mearsheimer explain these approaches in their works, with Moravcsik addressing liberalism and Mearsheimer realism. Moravcsik (1997) describes liberalism as “the relationship between states and the surrounding domestic and transnational society in which they are embedded” (pg. 516) and explains that this relationship “critically shapes state behavior by influencing the social purposes underlying state preference.” He