The Chinese regime is utilizing futuristic technologies, including digital surveillance, to shape the will of the people and control social behaviour, according to journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin, the authors of a new book, “Surveillance State, Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.”
Systematic surveillance in China is not just for governance but also for re-engineering human behavior, particularly in societies like Xinjiang where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set up an intricate web of surveillance—more concerning is that the communist regime is exporting this technology to other authoritarian regimes and countries around the world, said the authors during their book launch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Sept. 12.
“Chinese leaders have revived totalitarian techniques of the past and blended them with futuristic technologies in an effort not to eradicate a religious minority but to re-engineer it,” said Chin and Lin in their book.
“The campaign is one part of a radical experiment to reinvent social control through technology that is forcing democracies around the world to confront the growing power of digital surveillance and to wrestle with new questions about the relationship between information, security, and individual liberty.”
The authors, both senior journalists with the Wall Street Journal, said that the CCP is in control of incomprehensible volumes of personal data and it continues to collect more and more of it. It also continues to find new ways to utilize data to build what the authors called a “perfectly engineered” society.
Chin and Lin describe this perfectly engineered society in which artificial intelligence companies work in tandem with the police and where “the government has the power to track your every move with cameras that can recognize your face and the unique rhythms of your gait, microphones that can recognize your voice, and smartphone GPS systems that relay your location to within a few feet, in which government officials can scrutinize your private chat history, reading and viewing habits, internet purchases, and travel history, and can crunch the data to judge how likely you are to help or harm public order.”
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