September 2022

In recent years, both Chinese state and Communist Party organizations have fielded thousands of public opinion polls, on subjects ranging from hospital services, to rural revitalization, to food safety. Yet, much of the information gleaned from these surveys remains inaccessible to anyone else. And, since the mid-2010s, non-governmental entities, particularly foreign ones, have found it increasingly difficult to conduct their own surveys in China.

Over the past decade, Xi has become a transformational figure on a par with the two other giants of Chinese Communist Party rule: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Like them, he has reversed earlier policies, in Xi’s case the relative openness that his predecessors had fostered. In its place, he has implemented firmer control of almost every facet of life, from politics and religion to the economy and foreign affairs. Now 69, he is likely to be China’s leader into old age and is presiding over what may become a less predictable era of Chinese politics, one with troubling implications for countries around the world.

Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin discussed their new book with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke and Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell. Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control explores the political and social control the Chinese Communist Party is building by collecting and harnessing personal data from facial recognition, personal genomes, digital footprints, AI, and other forms of surveillance.

From his humble beginnings as a propaganda writer, Yan Lianke has gone on to become among China’s most controversial writers—one whose work is frequently censored for its focus on the lives of those devastated by Beijing’s policies. “When people are dreamwalking,” he writes in The Day the Sun Died (2015), “they see only the people and things they care about, and it is as if nothing else exists.”