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Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control

Surveillance State cover

Where is the line between utopia and a police state in the age of digital surveillance?

Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China鈥檚 Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated鈥攁nd often brutal鈥攈arnessing of data.

It is a story of technology born in Silicon Valley and America鈥檚 鈥淲ar on Terror,鈥 and now playing out in alarming ways on China鈥檚 remote Central Asian frontier. As a minority separatist movement strains against Party control, China鈥檚 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, both of the Wall Street Journal, 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鈥檚 ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway鈥攁 new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.

More 麻豆果冻传媒 the Authors

Josh Chin
Josh Chin
Josh Chin

麻豆果冻传媒 Fellow, 2020

Author, Surveillance State

Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control