Surveillance State
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Where is the line between digital utopia and digital police state?
Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China’s Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated—and often brutal—harnessing of data.
It is a story born in Silicon Valley and America’s “War on Terror,” and now playing out in alarming ways on China’s remote Central Asian frontier. As a minority separatist movement strains against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI. But across the country in the city of Hangzhou, the government is weaving a digital utopia, where technology helps optimize everything from traffic patterns to food safety to emergency response.
Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take listeners on a journey through the new world China is building within its borders, and beyond. Telling harrowing stories of the people and families affected by the Party’s ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway—a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press.
Customer Reviews
Out of sight, not.
The authors are American reporters from the Wall Street Journal, who have covered China for many years and won numerous awards for investigative and human rights journalism. Both were expelled from the PRC in 2021, principally due to their reporting of the plight of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Mr Chin now splits his time between Seoul and Taipei, while Ms Lin is based in Singapore. This book expands on work previously published in WSJ.
Following a number of chapters about the Uyghur situation, which is beyond Orwellian, the authors spread their net wider to examine contemporary surveillance culture in third world authoritarian quasi-dictatorships, or dictatorships in waiting, that the CCP and its homies like Huawei are happy to wire up with all the latest tech, for a price. Almost more disturbing is the extent to which US IT firms fostered the Chinese surveillance industry in the first place, and the pervasive nature of surveillance as it now exists in the Land of the Not-As-Free-As-They-Like-to-Think. Surveillance creep is more frightening than tax bracket creep, and goes well beyond the well-documented problems of facial recognition as a law enforcement tool, or as relates to January 6, 2021.
Following some reflections on Bentham’s Panopticon, the authors then catch up with a Uyghur family from earlier, who find their problems aren’t over even after they escape to the US.
There’s no mention of Britain or Europe, where things aren’t much better than they are in America, or here, where they probably still are. Based on the number of new cameras I’m seeing in local streets and shopping malls each year, I suspect we’re catching up fast, and don’t get me started on drones! (I live in a high rise block.)