A riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment—the definitive police state—and the global technology giants that made it possible.

Blocked from facts and truth, under constant surveillance, surrounded by a hostile police force: Xinjiang’s Uyghur population has become a cursed, oppressed, outcast population. Most citizens cannot discern between enemy and friend. Social trust has been destroyed systematically. Friends betray each other, bosses snitch on employees, teachers expose their students, and children turn on their parents. Everyone is dependent on a government that nonetheless treats them with suspicion and contempt, intent on disappearing large swathes of the population into a network of concentration camps, the largest internment of ethnic minorities since the Holocaust. Welcome to the Perfect Police State.
 
Using the haunting story of one young woman’s attempt to escape the vicious technological dystopia, his own reporting from Xinjiang, and extensive first-hand testimony from exiles, Geoffrey Cain reveals the extraordinary intrusiveness and power of the tech surveillance giants and the chilling implications for all our futures.

An NPR Book of the Day.

“A scarifying dive into China’s pernicious spy state…A prescient, alarming work on the overreach of technology and state power.”
—Kirkus starred review

“Packing a wealth of information into a crisp narrative, this is an impassioned and well-informed exposé.”
—Publishers Weekly

An in-depth, on-the ground view of how Chinese officials have co-opted technology, infrastructure and the minds of their people to establish the definitive police state.