Surveillance State

Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control

By: Josh Chin, Liza Lin

Narrated by: Brian Nishii

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.

©2021 Josh Chin and Liza Lin (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

A Generation accomplice to Genocide

Uighur's suffer "reeducation camps" while China uses Silicon Valley's brains and pursuit of profits to strangle minority culture in the west while creating a techno utopia in the east. Fascinating and frightening how the human can use the same technology for good and evil. The State strengthens at the expense of individuals. Lessons abound for Demacracy.

Excellent

A necessary read in order to understand the “surveillance creep” that can take place in any democratic society.

Great narration, great book

What an audio book should be about - also great to hear a narrator who can pronounce Chinese!

insightful on several levels

Traces the ways China's surveillance strategies have evolved as technology made ever greater surveillance possible. Offers insights into the value a collectivist culture puts on privacy. Breaks your heart through the specific application to the Uighurs. brings it home with the specific story of a specific Uighur family more in exile in the US

Wow

'1984' is alive and well.
And the writing is quite good.
Nice work Chin and Lin!