THE PERFECT POLICE STATE
AN UNDERCOVER ODYSSEY INTO CHINA’S TERRIFYING SURVEILLANCE DYSTOPIA OF THE FUTURE
‘Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report?’, asked the website Wbur, referring to the film about ‘a special police force in the future that does what’s called “preventive policing”, using psychics and technology to predict who will commit a crime’. According to investigative reporter Geoffrey Cain, China appears to have developed a version of this with its vast surveillance system used against ethnic minority Muslims in Xinjiang. The mass database is called the IJOP — the Integrated Joint Operations Platform — which, Wbur continued, ‘is a police platform that nudges officers when it believes someone is prone to committing an act of terror. The person is then visited by the police.’
The Public Affairs website described the book as a ‘riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment – the definitive police state – and the global technology giants that made it possible’. Edward Lucas in the Times likened the high-tech surveillance model to the ‘telescreen’ in Nineteen Eighty-four,
Maysem committed the almost unforgivable sin of studying abroad
‘a device that (rather like a modern mobile phone) pumped out propaganda, but could also monitor behaviour’. Cain’s central witness, wrote Lucas, is a likeable, studious young woman called Maysem, who committed the almost unforgivable sin of studying abroad, in Turkey.
‘Although a loyal Chinese citizen and from an impeccably Communist family, she ends up in a re-education camp, where she undergoes mental and physical torture aimed at breaking her spirit.’ Even more sinisterly, Lucas pointed out, is that, ‘Having fine-tuned the system on the Uighurs, the country’s Communist bosses are now extending it to the rest of the country.’ Lucas, while criticising Cain’s ‘plodding, jerky prose’, also believed he should have probed further, by examining how far the ‘Beijing regime is turning this system outwards, capturing data about foreigners to track our movements and predict our thoughts and deeds’. Throw away that Huawei phone now.