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

Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Wall Street Journal reporters who covered China for years, produced in this book the most comprehensive English-language account of China's domestic surveillance apparatus — the system of facial recognition cameras, mobile phone tracking, AI-powered predictive policing, and social scoring that the Chinese state has built into the fabric of daily life. The book is grounded in specific communities and specific individuals — Uighurs in Xinjiang, ordinary residents of Hangzhou, dissidents in Hong Kong — giving human texture to what could otherwise be an abstract account of technical systems.

The book's significance for the information environment extends beyond surveillance per se. China's domestic surveillance architecture is the foundation on which its information control is built: the ability to monitor what people read, say, and do online enables the state not merely to censor but to predict and prevent dissent before it forms. The system also serves as an export model — China has actively promoted its surveillance technology to authoritarian governments globally, along with the governance frameworks that legitimate its use. For practitioners working on digital authoritarianism, information control, or the geopolitics of technology, this is essential and deeply reported.