We Have Been Harmonized

Kai Strittmatter

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780063027312
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique asiatique

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's new drive for repression is being underpinned by unpre­cedented advances in technology: facial and voice recognition, GPS tracking, supercomputer databases, intercepted cell phone conver­sations, the monitoring of app use, and millions of high-resolution security cameras make it nearly impossible for a 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 to methods of birth control. Cameras (so advanced that they can locate a single person within a stadium crowd of 60, 000) scan for faces and walking patterns to track each individual's move­ment. In some schools, children's facial expressions are monitored to make sure they are paying attention at the right times. In a new Social Credit System, each citizen is given a score for good behavior; for those who rate poorly, punishments include being banned from flying or taking high-speed trains, exclusion from certain jobs, and preventing their children from attending better schools. And it gets worse: advanced surveillance has led to the imprisonment of more than a million Chinese citizens in western China alone, many held in draconian "reeducation" camps.

This digital totalitarianism has been made possible not only with the help of Chinese private tech companies, but the complic­ity of Western governments and corporations eager to gain access to China's huge market. And while governments debate trade wars and tariffs, the Chinese Communist Party and its local partners are aggressively stepping up their efforts to export their surveillance technology abroad—including to the United States.

We Have Been Harmonized is a terrifying portrait of life under unprecedented government surveillance—and a dire warning about what could happen anywhere under the pretense of national security.

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

Notes

1 James Mann, The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China, London 2008.

2 For more on the Communist Party’s appetite for experimentation and its ability to change, see Sebastian Heilmann, Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy-Making Facilitated China’s Rise, Hong Kong 2018.

3 Stein Ringen, a Norwegian scholar of sociology and political science based at Oxford University, calls the CCP’s rule “the perfect dictatorship” and terms it a “controlocracy”: “Although the controlocracy is sophisticated and does not depend on the omnipresence of terror, the threat of terror is omnipresent, and that threat is backed up by a physical use of violence that is sufficient for citizens to know that the threat is not an idle one.” (Stein Ringen, The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century, Hong Kong 2016, pp. 139–140.)

4 A representative example here is the exposé in the New York Times about the family of Wen Jiabao. Until 2013, Wen was China’s prime minister, and state propaganda always painted him as the modest, folksy “Grandpa Wen.” The New York Times revealed that by the end of his period in office, his family had amassed a fortune of at least $2.7 billion. See David Barboza, “Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader,” New York Times, October 25, 2012 (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wenjiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html).

5 Li Laifang, “Enlightened Chinese democracy puts the West in the shade,” Xinhua, October 17, 2017 (http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017–10/17/c_136685546.htm).

6 Extract from interview with Hannah Arendt by the French writer Roger Errera, “Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,” The New York Review of Books, October 26, 1978 (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/26/hannah-arendt-from-an-interview/).

7 Herta Müller, “Every word knows something of a vicious circle,” Nobel lecture, December 7, 2009 (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2009/muller/25729-herta-muller-nobel-lecture-2009/).

8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-in-cia-visit-attacks-media-for-coverage-of-his-inaugural-crowds/2017/01/21/f4574dca-e019-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.a0405f7ed48c

9 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, trans. Martin Brady, London 2000, p. 14.

10 Viola Zhou, “Beijing party boss promises to eradicate online political rumours ahead of key party congress,” South China Morning Post, September 27, 2017 (http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2113041/beijing-party-boss-promises-eradicate-online-political).

11 Geremie R. Barmé, “New China Newspeak,” China Heritage Quarterly, No. 29, March 2012 (http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/glossary.php?searchterm=029_xinhua.inc&issue=029).

12 Ibid.

13 George Orwell, 1984, New York, 1949, p. 34.

14 Anna Sun, “The diseased language of Mo Yan,” The Kenyon Review, autumn 2012 (https://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-fall/selections/anna-sun-656342/).

15 Geremie R. Barmé, “New China Newspeak,” China Heritage Quarterly, No. 29, March 2012 (http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/glossary.php?searchterm=029_xinhua.inc&issue=029).

16 Quoted in http://chinaheritage.net/journal/on-new-china-newspeak/

17 Or as other translations have it: “What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.” https://china.usc.edu/confucius-analects-13.

18 Mao said this for the first time on August 7, 1927, at an emergency meeting of the Party’s central committee in Wuhan. See: Shao Jianwu, “Mao Zedong qiang ganzi limian chu zhengquan de lishi yu yanbian” (“The story behind Mao Zedong’s ‘Political power grows ou...