Perspective: China syndromeData Leviathan: China’s Burgeoning Surveillance State

Classical totalitarianism, in which the state controls all institutions and most aspects of public life, largely died with the Soviet Union, apart from a few holdouts such as North Korea. The Chinese Communist Party retained a state monopoly in the political realm but allowed a significant private economy to flourish. Yet today, in Xinjiang, a region in China’s northwest, a new totalitarianism is emerging—one built not on state ownership of enterprises or property but on the state’s intrusive collection and analysis of information about the people there. Kenneth Roth and Maya Wang write in the New York Review of Books that Xinjiang shows us what a surveillance state looks like under a government that brooks no dissent and seeks to preclude the ability to fight back. And it demonstrates the power of personal information as a tool of social control.

Xinjiang covers 16 percent of China’s landmass but includes only a tiny fraction of its population—22 million people, roughly 13 million of whom are Uighur and other Turkic Muslims, out of nearly 1.4 billion people in China. Hardly lax about security anywhere in the country, the Chinese government is especially preoccupied with it in Xinjiang, justifying the resulting repression as a fight against the “Three Evils” of “separatism, terrorism, and extremism.”

Yet far from targeting bona fide criminals, Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang have been extraordinarily indiscriminate. As is now generally known, Chinese authorities have detained one million or more Turkic Muslims for political “re-education.” This latest “Strike Hard Campaign” has yielded the world’s largest case of mass arbitrary detention in decades. 

Beijing has tried to pass off the proliferating indoctrination centers as “vocational training” sites. In reality, the purpose is forced assimilation. Turkic Muslims are confined indefinitely until authorities determine that they have sufficiently replaced their religious and ethnic identity—their Islamic beliefs, language, culture, and traditions—with loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. In some areas, the government considers children with a parent or parents in detention to be “orphans” and holds them in state-run orphanages where they face similar brainwashing.

But the use of mass detention is only part of Xinjiang’s story. “What is even more striking is Beijing’s establishment there of a surveillance state, which plays a central role in determining who will be detained. The scope and intrusiveness of this effort may well be unprecedented. If this new form of totalitarianism is not curtailed, it portends a dystopia that other governments can be expected to emulate, threatening us all,” Roth and Wang write.