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.
The Times: The Perfect Police State by Geoffrey Cain review — inside China’s terrifying techno-dystopia
The Times: The Perfect Police State by Geoffrey Cain review — inside China’s terrifying techno-dystopia
This is a nightmarish account of brutality and mass surveillance under Chinese rule.
Marx and Lenin are supposedly the Chinese Communist Party’s great intellectual inspirations. But the high-tech surveillance model it is implementing draws on other great minds. The 18th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed a theory of the Panopticon, a prison designed around a single, invisible, all-seeing jailer, thus guaranteeing the docility of its inmates. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four heralded the “telescreen”, a device that (rather like a modern mobile phone) pumped out propaganda, but could also monitor behaviour.
Geoffrey Cain’s account of the techno-dystopia taking shape in mainland China blends historical background, business reporting, investigative journalism and political commentary. His central characters are the Uighurs, who hail from a western region known in Chinese as Xinjiang, or “New Frontier”. They, like their ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz
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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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For years, Tim Cook insisted Apple could change China from the inside. Instead, China changed Apple.
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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.