From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is the Daily.

Today, under Xi Jinping, China is pioneering a new form of governance by surveillance.

In the first of a two-part series, my colleague Paul Moser, on how China piloted that system,

on one minority group in the country.

It's Monday, May 6th.

Hi. Hi. Headphones.

Paul, we've actually never met. You are in town from China. I'm hoping you're going to tell me why.

Yeah. So I've been reporting in and around China for about 12 years.

And there's always been a lot of control. I think people are kind of aware of that.

They're aware of their censorship. They're aware that people can be followed.

And there is a certain amount of surveillance. But in the past five years, things have really changed

and taken a much more dramatic and darker turn really when it comes to especially surveillance.

And that sort of coincides with the rise of Xi Jinping.

So China's president, who came into power about five years ago, has really doubled down on control.

And he has been not shy at all about using technology to exert that control.

And there's a lot of things that are invisible and how that works.

But one of the very few kind of visible symptoms are the cameras.

There were always some cameras in China. But recently, past couple of years,

the cameras have just gone in in this dramatic way.

Some of them look like these sort of like broke modernist sculptures or something.

I mean, it's like four cameras stretching off of a different pole or you have a camera hanging from a tree.

I mean, there's these almost hidden cameras in the subway cars.

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