Mason Wong

Nov 7, 2024 | publicbooks.org | Mason Wong |Charlotte Rosen

The “world’s most advanced surveillance technologies,” explains political scientist Minxin Pei, are to be found today in China. These domestic spying initiatives boast powerful data-collection capabilities, as well as ostentatious, science fiction–inflected names: Skynet, Sharp Eyes, Golden Shield. What’s important to Pei’s The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, though, is that none of this technology turns out to work particularly well.