When I first read about how China tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, it was impossible not to think of “1984” and Big Brother.

Since then, China has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. It’s Mao-era policing on steroids. And as my colleagues David Pierson and Berry Wang write, that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian states and weak democracies across the world.

China is exporting its surveillance state

by David Pierson and Berry Wang

A village in the Solomon Islands had a problem: Young men, buzzed on betel nut and moonshine, were causing trouble. Residents asked the police for help; the officers who responded were Chinese, part of a security pact the country had signed with Beijing.

The officers proposed a solution: collect fingerprints and palm prints from every resident, along with information listing the names, addresses and birth dates of each household member. The playbook was part of a Mao-era community-surveillance system, recently revived under President Xi Jinping of China, that encourages neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies.

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