The Perfect Police State
An Undercover Odyssey into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future
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The Perfect Police State
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Narrated by:
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Feodor Chin
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By:
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Geoffrey Cain
About this listen
A riveting investigation into how a restive region of China became the site of a nightmare Orwellian social experiment - the definitive police state - and the global technology giants that made it possible.
Blocked from facts and truth, under constant surveillance, surrounded by a hostile alien police force: Xinjiang’s Uyghur population has become cursed, oppressed, outcast. Most citizens cannot discern between enemy and friend. Social trust has been destroyed systematically. Friends betray each other, bosses snitch on employees, teachers expose their students, and children turn on their parents. Everyone is dependent on a government that nonetheless treats them with suspicion and contempt. Welcome to the Perfect Police State.
Using the haunting story of one young woman’s attempt to escape the vicious technological dystopia, his own reporting from Xinjiang, and extensive firsthand testimony from exiles, Geoffrey Cain reveals the extraordinary intrusiveness and power of the tech surveillance giants and the chilling implications for all our futures.
©2021 Geoffrey Cain (P)2021 PublicAffairsListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
“The future has arrived and it is beyond anything George Orwell could have imagined. In this important new book, Cain details exactly how the Chinese Communist Party deployed 21st century technology - facial recognition, DNA tracking, artificial intelligence - to trap millions of its own citizens in a terrifying dystopia.” (Barbara Demick, author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea)
"The Perfect Police State should come with a warning: the scope of the Chinese surveillance state is deeper, broader, more insidious and terrifying than you can imagine. Geoffrey Cain deftly details how China has used global businesses, unabashed censorship at home and alliances with authoritarian regimes to create an ever-expanding police state. Cain doesn’t lose sight of the people entrapped by the system.... The Perfect Police State is a tour-de-force." (Elizabeth Becker, author of When the War Was Over)
"In an expose that is as timely as it is alarming, Geoffrey Cain shows how China is using artificial intelligence and totalitarian repression to turn its westernmost region into a human-rights hellhole. After reading The Perfect Police State, it is impossible to regard the Chinese leadership with anything other than contempt - and fear." (Blaine Harden, author of Escape from Camp 14)
What listeners say about The Perfect Police State
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Ionor
- 06-03-23
China's take on separatists challange through tech
This book tells the story about how China through excessive surveillance technology that since 9/11 popping its ugly head even in the West dealing with a separatist challenge from voices among the Uyghur minority striving for independence from its big brother despite the fact that the last time remote region of Xinjiang was "free" was when China was invaded by Japan after which minority leaders declared independence fully understanding that China's leadership dealing with invaders was not in shape to do anything about it in a same manner as Tibet got it independence when China was interfered with by UK that wanted to divide China to weaken it by creating division within. Of course, Chinese leadership as any other leadership of nation which was for a long time fractured into small kingdoms fighting against each other was not very keen to listen to such voices, as the integrity of the nation was the prerequisite for economic stability because nothing lure investors into manufacturing their products in China as much as ongoing civilian war which has the power to do even more harm than a heavy-handed one-party approach to solving issues without any space for democratic discussion. Of course, this book hardly mentions any of the reasoning behind China's decision-making and mostly portrays China as an oppressing dictatorship without providing much-needed context despite mentioning that members of Uyghurs were in process of training for their independence goal with the middle eastern terrorist groups and book even telling a short story of one member acting as a double spy when captured by the Chinese/ Freedom through terrorist acts is something which if tried by any minority in the US would "surely" not ended in similar fashion by sending brave young freedom fighters into not entirely legal installation at Guantanamo Bay which the US build on the soil of its ex-colony Cuba economically strained up to present day by the US exactly because interrogation methods used there are illegal within the US...
Now to the description of what this book did well, and why I still give it 4 stars.
Apart from the gradual loss of freedom enjoyed by Uyghurs ending up with sending a large portion of the minority population into reeducation camps portrayed by Chinese TV as happy places where people are being thought the Chinese way, sing together happy songs, and learning new skills is in fact just another name for concentration camps for forced labor where among other things being produced many of parts of products or even complete products you may have at home without even knowing it as even western companies were rather slow on policing its suppliers whatever due to additional profits, or just lack of oversight over its suppliers beyond quality control of products received.
A large portion of the methods used to subdue the population into submission are presented through the story of a young Uyghur woman that was a student to a teacher well known for embracing Uyghur independence passion among its students, which together with her study in a foreign country made this young bookworm idealist a prime target for possible troublemaker that was multiple times questioning the behavior of local Chinese authorities due to lack of information about what changed during the times of her foreign studies. Unwanted attention from people above eventually led to her imprisonment for re-eduction in one of those fancy places already mentioned, where she refused to do hard manual labor once arriving not seeing doing anything wrong just to end in an even worst place designed to strip person all of its dignity and turn it into a yet another drone within a beehive that is too frightened to think for itself, or even challenge wrongdoing of authorities. Behavior which she needed to pretend long enough for authorities to eventually let her go due to relentless pursuit from her mother begging all people she can to give her another chance, which once given was used to run away from this prison state before passports for Uyghurs were blocked...
There is also a brief mention of technology to monitor every citizen's move whatever in the physical or online world which makes for nowadays mostly cashless Chinese society very hard to stand against its own government's wrongdoings when a bad credit score can ban you from even buying a ticket to a next city. So, this book despite lacking a bit of context is still a very good example of how is technology designed to give power only to one side while heavily restricting/censoring the oppositon capable make any kind of succesfull rebelion against such system nowadays next to impossible for average citizen, understanding which will be certainly helpful in taking a part in a discussion about how much power should big tech corporations have and how much privacy and monetary freedom needs to be protected from a government that often buying all metadata from these companies they can thus loopholing laws that prohibit surveilance of its citizens without a proper reason in order to prevent our society go beyond the point of no return, after which the oppression from our own elected offiicials, and enforcers paid by our taxes in many cases happily sacrificing basic human rights for a percieved greater good, or geapolitical advantages will be next to impossible to fight against peacefuly when everybody's family become hostage to be blackmailed with if anyone dares speak out against the system or even challenge it by more radical means as we can see unfolding in Russia. Considering all that email, or search requests scanning, and positioning data together with reviews like this one big tech companies like Google has on you, making it for them easy to know which shop you visit, what you buy online, and what views you have, even the need for firearms registration is already just a formality in the US as the government knows a large chunk of owners base even without that purely by the means of IT surveillance, meaning that any freedoms Americans and its Five Eyes English speaking nations surveillance alliance sees over continental Europe are mostly an illusion. Europe even with its stronger privacy laws is heading in the same direction even if not pursuing to become a superpower anytime soon as its surveillance initiatives are seen by leaders as necessary to combat increased crime and terrorism, self-inflicted troubles due to lack of illegal immigrant filtering comparable to legal ones in order to combat aging population and marking anyone pointing on this as far-right racist. Regardless of the fact that the inconvenient and often suppressed reality of poorly managed immigration will spark a new wave of unwanted far-right nationalism as it already happening in Europe, and may helped certain unexpected presidential elections in the US a few years back, together with the targeted pre-election campaign by Cambridge Analytica using illegally obtained personal data.
Of course, why do we even need foreign countries co-financing divisive leaderships in our nations these days that can bring us closer to the Chinese level, when we happily give more extreme factions within our politics a free ride by performing a type of censorship we accuse opposing nations from doing, opposing nations that will happily exploit our overreaction to fuel the fire to our struggle for returning to normal after the recent events??? You can reach the top by becoming better or by dragging everyone else down. Some food for thought...
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- petri järvinen
- 14-04-22
explain the situation from first person perspectiv
great book that's hard to put down and easy to pick up. personal stories explain the situation and techniques used to oppress and brainwash humans in today's horrific reality that is Xinjiang.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 30-09-22
chilling true story
Stop China and do not take its money in hope of better future. You will be slaved.
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