Surveillance State:

Inside china’s quest to launch a new era of social control

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 readers 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 under way — a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.

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Reviews

“[A] rigorous and alarming study of how the Chinese Communist Party uses surveillance technology to monitor residents and quell dissent.”

—Publishers Weekly (read full review)

“The underside of digital technology on full, frightening display.”

—Kirkus Reviews (read full review)

“Essential reading for those interested in modern China.”

—Library Journal (read full review - paywalled)

“Surveillance State is a cautionary book…Its value is in showing how…surveillance systems are only as good (or bad) as the people who build them.”

— NPR (read full review)

“This is both a granular and a big-picture look at how today’s Chinese Communist Party has flipped the Cold War debate over civil liberties and state control on its head."

―New York Times (read full review)

“[E]ssential reading not only because of what it tells us about China ― and Chin and Lin have gathered spine-chilling material at great personal risk ― but also because of what it tells us about the rest of the world.”

— Bloomberg (read full column)

“In winning prose, Mr Chin and Ms Lin make a nuanced argument… ‘Surveillance State’ is an engrossing account of how, and why, [surveillance] technology has become so pervasive.”

— The Economist (read full review)

“[D]eeply valuable…Chin and Lin are fair and unflinching, and they rest their insights on the facts they gathered. That in itself makes Surveillance State a significant contribution to our understanding of what may prove to be a crucial moment in the arc of modern China.”

— The Journal of Democracy (read full review)

“[A]n important, timely, and deeply-researched book, which strives in the best journalistic fashion to ask questions and to present facts without fear or favor…[T]he authors never divert themselves with gee-whiz numbers or get lost in the technical complexities. It’s all about the people, the human and the humane.”

—The China Project (read full review)

“To read Surveillance State is to watch the watchers.”

— The South China Morning Post (read full story)

Advance Praise

"Josh Chin and Liza Lin have given us a truly groundbreaking investigation of China’s embrace of digital surveillance. The global scope and deep detail of their account retires the notion of an “all-seeing” surveillance as some future scenario; it is happening already. They will open your eyes to the astonishing intersection of data, politics, and the human body. Anyone who cares about the future of technology, of China, or of free will cannot afford to miss this." — Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

“Josh Chin and Liza Lin show how some of Silicon Valley's most celebrated advances, along with some of its most exalted companies, have enabled a vast experiment in Chinese social engineering that is terrifying and seductive in equal measure. Surveillance technologies, both inside China and around the world, are creating an alternative to the liberal order far more swiftly than most people believe. This book gives us a vital glimpse into what might replace it.” — Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy

"Surveillance State could not be more timely, both as a gripping, suspense-filled tale of what is actually happening to Uyghurs in China and as a description of digital dictatorship that makes abstractions like predictive analytics, facial and voice recognition technology, and integrated information systems terrifyingly concrete. People and governments in open societies need to see what is at stake in the decisions we make about how to balance liberty and security in the digital age; this book brings those choices home." — Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America

“There hardly is any Uyghur person in the Region who has not been subjected to the oppressive and systematic tactics of this high-tech war that the CCP has waged against its own citizens. Josh Chin and Liza Lin’s book reminds us how easily a state actor can quietly and stealthily take control of its people. As Uyghurs, we know this well. But to the rest of the world, Surveillance State should serve as a wake-up call.” — Jewher Ilham, author of Because I Have To

“This book is written for the future. It reveals beyond dispute the murky and distorted world we are about to face. Dictatorship and Big Data are closely intertwined. They surveil, control, and remold every individual—all this constitutes a vast, inescapable prison that leaves nowhere to hide, a sort of demonic laboratory…Left unchecked, it will push the rest of the world sliding into an abyss." — Murong Xuecun, author of Deadly Quiet City

“Surveillance State tackles a critical global issue—how rapidly growing surveillance of all kinds is implicated in struggles for democracy and against authoritarianism…the authors offer a careful and thoughtful, ambitious and journalistic analysis of how excessive and illiberal surveillance is expanding, and must be confronted everywhere. Engaging everyday stories of real people bring this urgent issue freshly to light.” — David Lyon, author of Pandemic Surveillance

“Surveillance State combines a sharply reported, penetrating account of the frontiers of China's digital police state with a balanced yet eviscerating investigation into its roots in the Communist Party’s untethered determination to regulate all aspects of people's behaviour to stay in power. Like the best of such stories, it has both ruthless and idealistic villains, and all manner of ordinary heroes.” — Richard McGregor, author of The Party

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