This is a nightmarish account of brutality and mass surveillance under Chinese rule.
By Edward Lucas
July 24, 2021
Marx and Lenin are supposedly the Chinese Communist Party’s great intellectual inspirations. But the high-tech surveillance model it is implementing draws on other great minds. The 18th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed a theory of the Panopticon, a prison designed around a single, invisible, all-seeing jailer, thus guaranteeing the docility of its inmates. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four heralded the “telescreen”, a device that (rather like a modern mobile phone) pumped out propaganda, but could also monitor behaviour.
Geoffrey Cain’s account of the techno-dystopia taking shape in mainland China blends historical background, business reporting, investigative journalism and political commentary. His central characters are the Uighurs, who hail from a western region known in Chinese as Xinjiang, or “New Frontier”. They, like their ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz
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