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

Release Date: September 6th, 2022

Where is the line between a digital utopia and a 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 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 underway―a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.

About The Authors:
JOSH CHIN is Deputy Bureau Chief in China for the Wall Street Journal. He previously covered politics and tech in China as a reporter for a newspaper for more than a decade. He led an investigative team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting in 2018 for a series exposing the Chinese government’s pioneering embrace of digital surveillance. He was named a National Fellow at New America in 2020 and is a recipient of the Dan Bolles Medal, awarded to investigative journalists who have exhibited courage in standing up against intimidation. Surveillance State is his first book. Born in Utah, he currently splits time between Seoul and Taiwan.

LIZA LIN works as a journalist covering data use and privacy for the Wall Street Journal from Singapore. Liza was part of the team that won the Loeb in 2018. Prior to the Wall Street Journal, Liza spent nine years at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Television. Surveillance State is her first book.