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How China Perfected the Surveillance State
Geoffrey Cain on Investigative Journalism, Authoritarian Power, and The Perfect Police State | In a wide-ranging conversation with Jennifer Grossman, CEO of The Atlas Society, investigative journalist Geoffrey Cain reflects on years spent reporting inside some of the world’s most restrictive regimes — and on the research behind his book The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.
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“We completely understand the price of freedom.”
– Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
EVER SINCE RUSSIAN forces started their all-out invasion in February, Ukraine has been hailed as an exemplar of how to defend against violent tyranny on the 21st-century battlefield. The country spun up an “IT Army” of volunteer hackers to take down Russian websites, used the Starlink satellite internet system to maintain communications as its own infrastructure was being destroyed, and launched a social media blitzkrieg to win support from around the world.
Thanks to AI, Apple’s China problem is only getting worse
For years, Tim Cook insisted Apple could change China from the inside. Instead, China changed Apple.
The latest evidence? Apple spent billions developing cutting-edge electric vehicle battery technology with Chinese automaker BYD, only to watch its innovations become the cornerstone of BYD’s rise to global electric vehicle dominance. Apple walked away with nothing. China walked away with everything.
This isn’t just another story about corporate research and development gone wrong. It’s a cautionary tale about how even America’s most valuable company has become trapped in China’s web of technological control — and how that web is about to tighten even further.
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The Samsung Sandwich
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The trouble with Abenomics
Council on Foreign Relations: There’s A Cop In My Pocket: Policymakers Need to Stop Advocating Surveillance by Default.
Encryption is like a baby: It comes with problems, but you wouldn’t solve them with blunt force. There is no safe form of “end-to-half” encryption, no backdoor that serves government authorities without also serving criminals. Yet under the banner of foreign relations, lawmakers continue to advance policies that normalize surveillance by default. These measures turn personal devices into monitoring tools, weakening security for everyone while claiming to strengthen it. Once encryption is compromised, hackers and hostile states gain the same access as police. The result is a quiet dismantling of privacy, civil liberties, and the open internet itself.
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The Persuasion: The Left, TikTok, and the World’s Biggest Police State
When Tik Tok arrived in the United States in 2017, it was framed as a harmless cultural export: a platform for dances, jokes, and viral creativity. But for anyone who had seen China’s surveillance state up close, its arrival felt ominous. Tik Tok is owned by ByteDance, a company deeply entangled with the Chinese Communist Party’s system of mass surveillance—one that has enabled the detention of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang. While the West debates whether concerns about Tik Tok amount to xenophobia, the app has already played a quieter role: suppressing information about a genocide, normalizing authoritarian power, and testing how easily human rights abuses can be made invisible in plain sight.