Surveillance State: Authors Josh Chin and Liza Lin on their new book on China's tech-enhanced social controls
Sinica Podcast
Kaiser Kuo
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2022
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Sinica, Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin join the program to discuss their new book Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control. From Urumqi to Uganda and from Hangzhou to the Bronx, the book explores every facet of technological surveillance from the technocratic mindset that birthed it to its spread, with Beijing's help, to many countries of the developing world. But it also examines the role that U.S. tech companies played in giving rise to it.
6:05 – The story of Tahir Hamut: a Uyghur poet living under Xinjiang’s surveillance state
12:50 – Will the Xinjiang model for surveillance be expanded to other parts of China?
16:37 – Is China actively pushing other countries to adopt its surveillance state practices?
23:26 – The case of Hangzhou: the benefits of the “smart city” model
27:17 – Is there a fundamental difference between the concept of “privacy” in China and the West?
30:55 – How Xu Bing’s film uses surveillance footage
35:39 – What accounts for Chinese society’s changing views on privacy?
40:12 – China’s tendency to apply an “engineering” mindset to fixing social problems
47:57 – Assessing US companies’ role in enabling Chinese surveillance
52:27 – Devising a policy that effectively bans hardware used for Xinjiang surveillance
1:01:03 – China’s new laws on digital data protection
1:05:05 – What the social credit system’s popular narrative gets wrong
1:10:40 – An example of Chinese propaganda fabricating the surveillance system’s success
1:14:29 – The future of privacy protection in China and the West
A full transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Liza: The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy
Josh: The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang by Perhat Tursun (translated by Darren Byler), a short novel about life for Uyghurs in modern China; The Wok: Recipes and Techniques: by Kenji Lopez
Kaiser: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics and How to Fix It by Will Bunch
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. |
| 0:15.8 | Subscribe to access from The China Project to get, well, access, access to not only our great daily newsletter, |
| 0:22.7 | but all the original writing on our website at theChinaproject.com. |
| 0:27.0 | We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials, great explainers, and trackers, |
| 0:32.0 | regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. |
| 0:36.0 | We cover everything from China's foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of podcasts. We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to |
| 0:38.3 | its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghers and other Muslim peoples |
| 0:43.1 | in China's Xinjiang region, to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a |
| 0:49.3 | post-carbon footing. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is |
| 0:55.3 | reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you |
| 1:01.4 | today from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A couple of episodes back, Bloomberg chief |
| 1:06.4 | economist Tom Orlik recommended a book on our podcast, and he said that he thought it |
| 1:10.7 | really stood out from the pack of China books that he's read of late. |
| 1:14.4 | Surveillance State by Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Lisa Lin. |
| 1:19.0 | I echoed him then, and I mentioned that I'd be talking to them about the book, and I am delighted that that's exactly what we will be doing on the show this week. |
| 1:27.1 | Surveillance State inside China's quest to launch a new era of social control |
| 1:31.5 | is a book that is at once very powerful and scary and moving |
| 1:35.7 | and perhaps surprisingly really quite subtle. |
| 1:39.3 | It complicates and often challenges the narrative that, in my estimation, |
| 1:43.4 | has taken root in American and |
| 1:45.3 | Western thinking on China and its immense surveillance apparatus. |
| 1:49.1 | It goes way beyond just static descriptions of the systems China has deployed and raises deep, |
... |
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