Lisa Lynn is here.

She is a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the co-author with Josh Chin

of Surveillance State Inside China's Quest to launch a new

era of social control. It is an incisive and remarkable book, and I'm eager to talk with her

about it. One of the book's main subjects is the Chinese Communist Party's ongoing attempt to use a blend of

digital, psychological, and physical brutality to oppress the Muslim Uyghurs in the western

province of Xinjiang.

As the book says, the Communist Party's offensive in Xinjiang ranks among the most unsettling

political developments of the 21st century.

Chinese leaders have revived totalitarian techniques of the past and blended them with futuristic

technologies in an effort not to eradicate a religious minority, but to re-engineer it.

The book also discusses the CCP's efforts to use pervasive surveillance to

promote prosperity, a campaign it's waging, for example, in eastern smart cities, where AI is

easing traffic and assisting law enforcement. The party is seeking to use powerful cameras,

facial recognition technology, online data harvesting, and AI-powered

information analysis platforms to render the citizenry hyper-legible.

But it is doing this not only to shore up its direct control, but also to create convenience

and efficiency. The CCP is attempting, in short, to create a vast

system of technological carrots and, sometimes quite disturbing, sticks. As the book puts it,

the party thinks it has the blueprint for the rival system to liberal democracy it is long

dreamed of building. By mining insight from surveillance data, it believes it can

predict what people want without having to give them a vote or a voice. By solving social

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