Source｜Cultural aspect(ID: whzh_21bcr )
Author｜Ou Shujun, School of International Relations, Renmin University of China
Head image｜CFP.CN
The seventh national population will be launched soon. Starting from November 1, 2020, more than 7 million census workers will enter thousands of households to carry out census registration. The census is a basic form of national certification.
Associate Professor Ou Shujun of Renmin University of China pointed out that “certification” is another cost of rights, a prerequisite for realizing governance modernization, and a public good that the government should provide. In fact, with the enhancement of modern national certification capabilities, most people have entered the certification system, which undoubtedly reduces the intermediate cost of communication between the country and the people, and provides conditions for paying attention to the expectations of the majority of people and serving the majority of people. .
The author believes that China’s national certification system and system construction should be aimed at serving the vast majority of citizens. The optimization of this governance technique is an important sign that China’s national governance is becoming more and more normalized and mature.
This article was originally published in the fourth issue of “Jurists” in 2012. It was published with the author’s authorization. It only represents the author’s views. It is hereby compiled for readers’ reference.
Certification and State Power
National certification refers to the identification and confirmation of the basic facts of natural and legal persons by the state. If the state does not have the ability to collect social knowledge in a comprehensive manner and provide for the exchange and sharing of various government departments, the state apparatus will not be able to protect citizens’ economic, social and political rights, privacy, and freedom.
Therefore, in its most basic sense, certification is the most basic basic national system and a public good that the government should provide. Its publicity is reflected in the fact that it is the prerequisite of almost all national systems. Called “the foundation of the foundation”.
Certification is a basic state power in the sense of Michael Mann. Mike Mann takes the following dichotomy of state power as the core of his state theory: despotic power and infrastructural power. Autocratic power refers to the power that national elites do not need to conduct routine consultations with social groups. Basic power refers to the institutional capacity of a modern centralized state to implement its orders throughout the country and coordinate social life. The more social life needs the coordination of the state system, the stronger the constructive effect of basic power on social life.
The enhancement of basic power means the enhancement of power organization technology, the enhancement of basic structures such as means, organization, logistics, and communication, because these organizations and the ability to control people, things, and territories and their processes throughout history, It is the core of power. Therefore, in Mike Man’s view, state functions diffuse, cover and penetrate the entire national border through the infrastructure, and basic power is the state’s ability to coordinate, restrict and regulate social life through the infrastructure.
Without a sound certification system, it is more likely that there will be various failures in social security, fiscal absorption, national identity, core values, food safety, drug supervision, public transportation, health care, national education, social security, and political response Phenomenon, without the solid support of “facts” (social knowledge), it is impossible to use “laws” (normative rules) as the criterion, and it is difficult to construct a good rule of law and social order.
Modern concepts such as survey, registration, census, and statistics are the products of national certification efforts. The prefixes such as quality, qualification, education, and security demonstrate the wide applicability of social certification. From the ancient West to the modern West, the characterization of governance objects, the centralization of the right to collect social facts, and authentication mechanisms such as databases and personal numbers have promoted the sinking of sovereignty, the upward shift of governance and the innovation of governance in modern countries .
Pre-modern governance system relies on certification
The operation of a country depends on the authentication of the identity and property of a person. Where there is a country, there is authentication. The conscription, taxation, enlistment and public security functions of pre-modern countries are the main driving force for the establishment and maintenance of the national certification system. The focus of certification is on the people, property, and things that are meaningful to the survival and governance of the country, that is, the taxpaying population and taxpayers. Property and population eligible for service (military service, labor service). For example, the identification categories of households, land, fields, livestock, slaves, precious metals, dependents, strong men, soldiers, etc., and the storage of social knowledge such as census, land survey, property registration, account books and tax books, and official archives, can be said to be all It is a product of national certification requirements. The interest of national certification lies in the taxpaying population, the service population, and the taxable property. It is the same in ancient and modern times. It is common in China and the West, and there is no difference in government form.
The census, which began in 578 BC and has been in use until the beginning of the Roman Empire, was the first institutionalized attempt by Western countries to authenticate. There are specialized officials in charge, there is a written citizen roster that comprehensively records the identity and property status of citizens and their family members, there is a death table to record the number of slaves and the lives and deaths of slaves, and there is a land survey covering slaves and serfs, which is used for conscription and taxation , Sacrifices, tribal division, exclusion of political qualifications and enforcement of laws.
After that, from the fall of the Roman Empire in AD 476 to the mid-late Renaissance for a long millennium, theocratic power overwhelmed the political power, the power of the secular state was scattered and fragile, special population and land surveys were very rare, and the population could not be accurately calculated. The most important thing is the property investigation that directly meets the needs of war and the tax registration of tithes submitted to the church, but it is very unreliable due to the serious interference of the corrupt behavior of the nobility, priests and bureaucrats.
In general, before the 1620s, European countries basically did not see long-term institutional arrangements. In contrast, some commercial cities and countries in the Middle Ages established relatively strict forms of identity and property authentication. For the sake of security and taxation, Florence and other medieval cities and countries shifted from a general lottery system to a system of men’s roster, financial account books, and guilds.
In the process of the formation of modern Western nation-states, the kingship tried to get rid of the control of theocracy and autonomously grasped the authentication power to understand the people and property of its own land, which promoted the advancement of the authentication system in the Western world. The pursuit of human freedom and dignity is not only for independence from God, but more importantly, to respond to the challenge of capitalist market forces, which gave birth to a new authentication system-registration of life, which caused the common power of kingship and divine power. Favor. In the late Renaissance, the western world began to establish a life registration system based on the church’s baptism, wedding and funeral records.
In 1533, the Pope of Rome expelled Henry VIII from his membership. The King of England immediately established a state religion and became a leader. Prime Minister Thomas Cromwell ordered the priests across the country to register the number of baptisms, marriages and deaths every week since 1538. This is the first time that religious certification has been recognized by the country in Europe and transformed into State system.
Although the Pope of Rome has severed ties with Britain, he really likes this new certification system. In 1563, the Pope of Rome ordered bishops of all countries to fully implement birth and marriage registration. Colonies of various countries have also been implemented. The French colony of Quebec in North America has been registered by Roman priests in charge of births, deaths and marriages since 1621. These church records with the parish as the unit have profoundly influenced the census of the later industrialized countries, and citizens began to be recognized and identified by the state as specific individuals. This gradually routine and regular national practice has become a powerful supplement to the regular census, and has finally become a formal identity authentication system.
Countries generally established life registration as a legal form of identity authentication, and embarked on a modern road of “taming contingency and uncertainty”. Supplemented by the regular population census and modern household census in modern times, the content of life registration has evolved from only including births, deaths and weddings and funerals, to also covering live births, stillbirths, adoptions, claims, cancellations, migrations and diseases Including all the important characteristics of the individual, the entire life process of a person has become the object of attention of the country, and the sovereignty of the country has completely sank to the individual for the first time.
Modern Authentication: Characterization of People and Things
The sinking of sovereignty mentioned here is a product of the “politicalization of life” in the sense of Giorgio Agamben.
In Agamben’s view, law is a kind of political power, a kind of political control that controls the difference between a person’s political citizenship and a person’s naked life characteristics; it highlights the naked personality of a person, strengthening rather than weakening modern power , The control of classification rights also included naked people into political calculations, strengthening rather than weakening the sovereignty of modern countries. As the most important identity authentication system, life registration and regular census means that the country has the ability to collect various basic characteristics of individuals, which is also a process of sinking national sovereignty.
Compared with China’s developed and long history of identity authentication system, the regular census of European monarchies did not start until around the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, and was officially established in most European kingdoms in the middle and late 19th century. The United States began a regular census in 1850, and the Japanese census began in 1920. Since World War II, the regular census has become a basic political reality in most countries.In practice, the country has begun to grasp more and more personal physical, social and economic characteristics through the census.
Changes in economic and social factors have put forward higher requirements for national certification capabilities. The state needs to include more personal characteristics into the scope of certification and characterize the vast majority of people, so that the governance of individuals can be strengthened.
Since the middle and late 19th century, the difference between modern certification and pre-modern certification has become bigger and bigger. The objects of modern certification are becoming more and more individualized, individuals are becoming more and more characteristic, social facts are more extensive, and distinctions For clarity, the rules are more refined. By the beginning of the 20th century, after about a hundred years of evolution, the regular census of the modern West has left pre-modern certification far behind in the two dimensions of facts and norms, and is grasping the individualization and personal characteristics of certification objects. Chemically, it is far more effective than in the past. This is especially true after combining modern life registration with regular sampling surveys.
Modern population censuses generally have a long cycle, usually every five or ten years, reflecting the relatively stable population structure and population size in a relatively long period of time; the life registration cycle is short, and the shortest registration is once a week. The long-term registration is once a year, and many items are registered when there are changes, such as migration, marriage, divorce, death, illness, etc., reflecting the important life activity trajectory of an individual in a short period of time. The combination of the population census and life registration has enabled the country to discover the laws of the population based on comprehensive and reliable statistical data, calculate the birth rate, death rate, compile life tables, and calculate life expectancy, national life intensity, future population and labor population. Provide a basis for the court’s judgment on damages, improve public health, and determine the insurance premium rate and fertility rate table for life insurance. The certification system allows the country to more accurately analyze the size, distribution, economic and social structure of the population and its changing trends, so as to make a relatively reasonable population forecast, formulate and implement appropriate laws and public policies.
Focusing on the various physical, social and economic characteristics of people and things, paying attention to the names, locations, numbers, flow directions, and the pros and cons of people and things, has become a large-scale governance problem that modern countries must face As part of this, certification has become a basic function of the country. Personal characteristics such as personal name, age, birth, education, marriage, identity, occupation, income, real property, movable property, honor, delinquency, disease, mobility, etc., food safety, product quality, drug safety, public health incidents, and social economy Affairs have been included in the scope of national certification.
The knowledge of certification has evolved to this day and has covered various physical, social and economic characteristics of people. The various characteristics of people are the type of knowledge that national certification needs to pay attention to, and it is also the basic social facts that the country wants to collect. Combined with modern communication technologies such as databases and the Internet, the country has the ability to gradually accumulate these certification knowledge.To improve the accuracy, uniqueness and integration of certification, and then on the basis of comprehensive facts, according to various characteristics of people, clear classification of people, establish fine rules for the particularity of individuals, and finally in the whole country Set and implement unified certification standards within the scope.
With the characterization of people, things are becoming more and more characteristic in the eyes of the country. At the beginning, modern countries often combined population censuses, housing censuses, agricultural censuses, commercial censuses, and industrial censuses. In addition to the various characteristics of people, the various characteristics of objects have also been carefully collected. In the 1960s, 52 countries conducted population censuses. In most countries, population censuses were combined with housing censuses. One-third of countries conducted agricultural censuses. Commercial and industrial censuses were mostly not combined with census. The emergence of economic census and social statistics has made the scope of modern certification greatly exceed premodern certification, and the ability of modern countries to confirm and identify the characteristics of objects greatly exceeds premodern countries. The various characteristics of objects and all aspects of social life are included in the unified national certification system.
The characterization of governance objects means that the sovereignty of modern Western countries is further sinking. Intermediaries such as territories, tax-included merchants, and local agents have been crossed or eliminated, and sovereignty has been successfully constructed in the individual sense, and sovereignty no longer functions Regarding the human body, punishment no longer directly affects the flesh, but discipline has been strengthened, and law and order are more likely to be followed by the vast majority of people.
Technological innovation and modern national governance system
The nationalization of the right to collect facts seems to be an impossible task for a modern country facing increasingly complex population and other economic and social factors.
However, the innovation of communication technology, a governance technique in the information age, has changed this situation, giving the country unlimited possibilities to improve its certification capabilities at the two levels of fact and regulation. Compared with the ability of the country to establish an effective certification system for most people, the possibility of individuals and groups evading certification on a large scale is becoming less and less. Once there is an effective national certification system, evasion of certification will be weakened into sporadic crimes, and it will become easier to detect and punish.
Modern communication technologies such as databases and the Internet enable the country to assign a unique personal number to each citizen, such as identification number, tax number, social security number, medical number, etc., and establish a national database governance mechanism in important policy areas , Such as crime databases, taxation databases, social security databases and agro-industrial products, food and drug quality databases, etc.
From 1970 to 1980, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Britain, GermanyMost developed countries such as Australia, Canada, the United States, and Japan, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have established various national databases based on personal numbers. This makes the government the largest customer of the computer industry and The largest owner of personal data. For example, the Swedish government holds the country’s largest database containing the personal data of every citizen. In 1973, 21 central government departments in the United Kingdom established specialized data processing agencies.
The modern authentication system based on personal numbers and national databases enables everyone’s information to be stored in at least one government database with a unified national personal number as the core. Personal behavior becomes statistically predictable, and It may be associated with various data such as income records, credit records, criminal records, official property and job behavior records, health records, and social security files.
Another important difference between modern countries and pre-modern countries is that the transformation, command, supervision and redistribution into the basic functions, basic power and basic systems of the country.
Western countries, especially modern Western countries, are also inseparable from the basic role of certification if they want to perform their functions of enrichment, command, supervision and redistribution. The compulsory, assimilated, motivated, supervised, redistributed, and commanding capabilities of modern Western countries have been improved to varying degrees. Modern Western countries’ penetration of daily social and economic life has greatly deepened, and the constraints and restrictions on abuse of power have therefore been greatly enhanced Enhanced.
The ability of modern countries to learn is inseparable from modern authentication based on personal numbers and national databases.
On the basis of the 1970 and 1975 censuses, Sweden has established the most comprehensive personal database that has been in use today, solicited a large amount of administrative information from various departments, and established 114 kinds of government registration databases, including all 6.5 million taxpayers nationwide. (1970s) Central Taxpayer Registry.
The Central Revenue Agency of the United Kingdom has passed annual personal income surveys, accumulating personal tax information and other personal information year by year. The certification of personal property is not only used to increase national taxes, but also to improve various social security programs.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service also has the world’s largest personal identity, employment, income, and tax returns. The modern property certification centered on taxation has enabled modern countries to grasp all the economic characteristics of each person. This is a reality that every modern person must accept.
The compulsory ability of a modern country is also inseparable from modern authentication based on personal numbers and national databases.
For example, the British Ministry of Home Affairs is responsible for the administration of criminal justice, criminal disposal and prison operation data. In 1934, the index database of drug addicts was established, and the index database of criminals began to be established in 1963. In 1968, doctors had to report the situation of drug addicts to the Ministry of the Interior. In the 1960s, the prison index database was established, and in 1971, the index database of drug abusers and criminals began to be established.
The National Crime Information Center established by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation is also the largest employment information center, personal information and identity center in the United States, directly or indirectly serving 57,000 federal courts, state courts, and local criminal justice agencies across the United States. Serving 110,000 police officers, prosecutors, judges, probation officers and correction officers across the United States.
The redistribution capacity of modern countries is also inseparable from modern authentication based on personal numbers and national databases.
The national function known as the “welfare state” has been inseparable from the basic facts such as the name, location and number of people, as well as the authentication of identity, property, behavior and various characteristics. The secularization of the form of identity authentication is the key to ensuring public order and social welfare.
However, this process was not completed until the end of the 19th century. European countries were unable to apply decision-making to all people, especially the rural people who were unable to see their benefits as citizens.
By the middle of the 20th century, after the welfare state was established as an ideal country in developed countries in Europe and America, the people realized the benefits of national welfare and began to be willing to be included in the certification system, which also meant that the people had to provide the country with More personal information.
For example, the United States enacted the “Social Security Act” in 1935, which directly linked the payment of individual pensions to the amount of taxation. For this purpose, it took five or six years to conduct a national taxpayer’s income and property survey before it was officially launched. Retirement protection plan. The National Bureau of Vital Statistics was established in 1950. In 1960, it was transformed into the National Health Statistics Center. It is a full-time national health survey that collects almost all health data required by the Ministry of Health, Education and Welfare. The administrative health records are funded by the New Health Protection established in 1977. Bureau save. The Social Security Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Education, and Welfare is the most concentrated and abundant national institution in the United States with population and economic data. It has the employment, income, benefits, and benefits required for national retirement insurance, disability subsidies, health protection, and child family subsidies. All the information on people, welfare payments, etc.
unfinished discussion
Can countries and individuals be effectively communicated through the certification system, Is an important indicator of whether a country is mature and normal. With effective communication technology, with the help of census, life registration, economic census, social statistics, personal numbers and national databases and other authentication forms, it is possible for the country to establish an effective authentication system to achieve direct communication between the country and individuals. Directly implement the will of the state on individual citizens, minimize the distortion and loss of intermediate links, and greatly improve the effectiveness of political decision-making, laws and public policies. Furthermore, let every citizen not only act as a taxpayer, but also a welfare beneficiary, and let every citizen’s life process receive comprehensive and meticulous attention, so that people’s quality of life can be steadily improved, and people’s lives and economic and social security can be guaranteed.
In short, certification can be regarded as the country’s most basic “fundamental power”. Observing the evolution of certification practices in developed industrialized countries and the growth and extension of certification systems can allow us to face up to the cost of certification of rights, and to understand rights, freedom, A richer understanding of the realization of equality and property rights and their limitations, a more reliable imagination of the country’s efforts to promote administrative education, implement laws, maintain order, and effective governance, and have a more accurate definition of the scope and boundaries of modern sovereignty and governance . In the long run, this balanced understanding and imagination will help us build a strong, democratic and legal country.
As a country with a large population and an ancient civilization striving for modernization, industrialization, and urbanization, while improving the effectiveness of national governance and enhancing the welfare of the people, the future of China’s basic certification system will be improved to a large extent. The failure of governance in the field affects the future of national life.
In this sense, the most successful aspect of the national informatization construction initiated by the Chinese government from 1993 to 1994 is not the monitoring of the Internet industry, individuals and social life, but the construction of the national certification system. The improvement of governance techniques aimed at serving the vast majority of citizens. This is an important sign that China’s national governance is becoming more and more normalized and mature.