We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State

An award winning China correspondent reveals how George Orwell’s chilling vision of authoritarianism in 1984 is being outdone by China’s rulers.

It was not all that long ago that politicians and tech gurus were giddily proclaiming new information technologies, especially the internet, as every autocrat’s worst enemy. Even in dictatorships like China, they promised to bring freedom and undermine authoritarian rule.

Tim Berners-Lee, often credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, declared that “piece by piece, website by website, China’s ‘great firewall’ would meet the same fate as the Berlin Wall.” These digital evangelists could not have been more wrong. In We Have Been Harmonized, journalist Kai Strittmatter reveals how the internet and high tech have allowed China to create the largest and most effective surveillance state in history.

This new drive for repression is being underpinned by unprecedented advances in technology: Facial and voice recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputer databases, intercepted cell phone conversations and monitoring of app use, and millions of high-resolution security cameras make it nearly impossible for a Chinese citizen to hide anything from authorities.

Commercial transactions, including food deliveries and online purchases, are fed into vast databases including everything from biometric information to social media activities to methods of birth control, among hundreds of other inputs. Cameras (so advanced that they can locate a single person within a stadium crowd of 60,000) scan for faces and walking patterns to track each individual‘s movement. In some schools, children‘s facial expressions are monitored to make sure they are paying attention at the right times. In a new Social Credit System each citizen is given a score for good behavior; for those who score poorly punishments include being banned from flying or taking a high speed train, exclusion from certain jobs, and having their children prevented from attending better schools.

Most recently, the coronavirus pandemic led to the implementation of now-ubiquitous thermal cameras that combine fever measurement with face recognition of passersby, as well as apps that track users' health status - and may send the information collected to state authorities.

And there’s worse: Advanced surveillance has been behind the imprisonment of more than a million Chinese citizens in Western China alone, many held in draconian “re-education“ camps.

This digital totalitarianism has been made possible not only with the help of Chinese private tech companies, but the complicity of Western governments and corporations eager to gain access to China’s huge market. And while governments debate trade wars and tariffs, the Chinese Communist Party and its local partners are aggressively stepping up their efforts to export their surveillance technology abroad - including to the United States.

We Have Been Harmonized is a chilling portrait of life under unprecedented government surveillance - and a dire warning to about what could happen anywhere under the pretense of national security.