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

When Americans hear about surveillance in China, it is usually through a dystopian lens. There is good reason for that—in the west of the country, the Uighur minority has been persecuted with unprecedented technological force. In a  new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control” veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin aim to expand that lens, to “help people grasp state surveillance in its totality.” They ask how the Chinese government’s deployment of AI-powered tools of social control can actually be alluring and useful to everyday people, even as it is nightmarish to those caught in its algorithmic teeth.