China’s Digitally Engineered Society

Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, by Josh Chin and Liza Lin, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022, 312 pages, hardcover.

Xi Jinping, the leader of Communist China, is convinced that the East is rising and the West is declining, and that time and momentum are on his side. He is also, like his predecessors, deadly serious about keeping a close eye on the masses. That is a major undergirding theme of Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.

In this straightforward and generally hard-hitting volume, the authors recognize that under Xi, “the Party” — which is usually the reference used (as opposed to the “Chinese government” or “Beijing”) — thinks that it has designed the blueprint only dreamed of by its rivals. “By mining insight from surveillance data,” the Party believes that it can “predict what people want without having to give them a vote or a voice. By solving social problems before they occur and quashing dissent before it spills out onto the streets, it believes it can strangle opposition in the crib,” they write.

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