Inside the surveillance state: how China coerces its people by making them think their every move is being watched
- The tools of modern surveillance, created and perfected in Silicon Valley by Facebook, Google and Amazon but married to a state power, have a powerful impact
- China’s spy cameras and data collection may not be all-seeing, but people only need to think they are for them to work, say the authors of Surveillance State
“State surveillance has been with us as long as there have been states,” point out Josh Chin and Liza Lin in their new and thoroughly researched guide to the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to mould society through observation and mass-data collection.
In a way, they tell us in Surveillance State, there’s nothing new here.
“As far back as 3800BC, Babylonian kings in what is now Iraq pioneered an embryonic form of mass-data collection, using cuneiform and clay tablets to keep a constantly updated record of people and livestock.”
“China didn’t invent any of this,” says Chin, with Wall Street Journal colleague Lin on a video call from Singapore. “Almost all these technologies were invented in Silicon Valley by Google and Facebook and Amazon, perfected by them, and arguably used more effectively in terms of collecting data and using them to analyse and predict human behaviour.”
But whereas these tools were originally intended for what is now known as surveillance capitalism – compiling digital dossiers on consumers to better sell their attention to advertisers – the Communist Party’s application is more sinister. Or more public-spirited, it might claim.