We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State

Named a Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2020 by the Washington Post

As heard on NPR's Fresh Air, We Have Been Harmonized, by award-winning correspondent Kai Strittmatter, offers a groundbreaking look, based on decades of research, at how China created the most terrifying surveillance state in history.

China'snew drive for repression is being underpinned by unpre-cedented advances intechnology: facial and voice recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputerdatabases, intercepted cell phone conver-sations, the monitoring of app use, and millions of high-resolution security cameras make it nearly impossible fora Chinese citizen to hide anything from authorities. Commercial transactions, including food deliveries and online purchases, are fed into vast databases, along with everything from biometric information to social media activities tomethods of birth control. Cameras (so advanced that they can locate a singleperson within a stadium crowd of 60,000) scan for faces and walking patterns totrack each individual's move-ment. In some schools, children's facialexpressions are monitored to make sure they are paying attention at the righttimes. In a new Social Credit System, each citizen is given a score for goodbehavior; for those who rate poorly, punishments include being banned fromflying or taking high-speed trains, exclusion from certain jobs, and preventingtheir children from attending better schools. And it gets worse: advancedsurveillance has led to the imprisonment of more than a million Chinesecitizens in western China alone, many held in draconian "reeducation" camps.

This digitaltotalitarianism has been made possible not only with the help of Chinese privatetech companies, but the complic-ity of Western governments and corporationseager to gain access to China's huge market. And while governments debate tradewars and tariffs, the Chinese Communist Party and its local partners areaggressively stepping up their efforts to export their surveillancetechnologyabroad--including to the United States.

We Have Been Harmonized is a terrifying portrait of life underunprecedented government surveillance--and a dire warning about what couldhappen anywhere under the pretense of national security.

"Terrifying. ... A warning call." --The Sunday Times (UK), a "Best Book of the Year so Far"