China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone

[Commentary] China is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public safety,” it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.

A state-run, party-inspired, data-driven monitoring system poses profound questions for the West about the role of private companies in government surveillance. Is it ethical for private companies to assist in massive surveillance and turn over their data to the government?  What emerges in China will not stay in China. Its repressive technologies have a pattern of diffusing to other authoritarian regimes around the world. For this reason—not to mention concern for the hundreds of millions of people in China whose meager freedom will be further diminished—democracies around the world must monitor and denounce this sinister creep toward an Orwellian world.

[Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Anna  Mitchell is a student and researcher at Stanford University.]