The sloppy surveillance state — Editor’s note for Friday, July 22, 2022

Dear reader,

On September 1, we will change our name to The China Project. We’re already warming up our new URL, TheChinaProject.com, so that emails from us will hopefully not be flagged as spam by your email platform. You can read more about our decision to change our name here.

Sloppy surveillance: Set in 2047, Red Moon is a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson that tells the stories of various characters caught up in U.S.-China lunar rivalry. Published in 2018, the book projects many recent events and trends into the future, including the rise of the Chinese surveillance state.

Robinson did his research: One of the things he gets right about China is how the surveillance state doesn’t always work very efficiently, since there are so many different government departments involved, and they often don’t coordinate their activities. For all the fearsome power of the panopticon that Beijing is constructing to monitor its citizens, this is a system that has many problems, including very sloppy storage of all the data the surveillance state collects. That is the subject of a new report by The Wall Street Journal’s Karen Hao: China has a problem with data leaks. One reason is its surveillance state.

See also Mike Cormack’s review of Surveillance State, a new book by Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin, summarized below.

Our phrase of the week is: small-town test taker (小镇做题家 xiǎo zhèn zuò tí jiā), a self-deprecating — or slightly insulting — phrase to describe a country bumpkin who works their butt off in pursuit of success.