The Mandarin in the Machine

China's leaders have always been preoccupied with their demise. For them, the only thing harder than coming to power is keeping it. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), judging by word and deed, is obsessed with "stability maintenance" and the frailties that riddle its political system. When Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauºescu's brutal Communist regime collapsed on Christmas Day in 1989, security was tightened around Zhongnanhai, the compound that houses the CCP's central headquarters. After the Soviet "Big Brother" drew its last breath, the Party dispatched teams of experts to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia to autopsy the Soviet Union and determine the weaknesses and errors that had caused its collapse.

In February 2011, I witnessed China's paranoid party-state firsthand when truckloads of security officers swarmed the swank Wangfujing shopping street and other upscale Beijing spots in anticipation of protests—the so-called Jasmine Rallies—triggered by the Arab Spring uprisings. Days earlier, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been ousted, and China's Public Security Bureau was on edge. The authorities banned jasmines from Beijing florists, and vendors were told to report anyone intent on buying the flower (a symbol borrowed from Tunisia's revolution of the month before). Even now, nearly two decades since the start of the "color revolutions," Party officials still regularly warn that they must steel themselves against possible popular uprisings that can sweep across the land. It is no small wonder that the budget for domestic security outstripped China's military budget years ago.

Josh Chin and Liza Lin, two veteran Wall Street Journal reporters, tell the story of the newest and most terrifying turn in the CCP's mission to maintain its grip on power. Their deeply valuable book, Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, details in chilling fashion how China has traded old-style, shoe-leather surveillance tools for Silicon Valley sophistication. The Stasi-style methods of workplace informants and neighbor spying on neighbor have given way to a massive data-harvesting enterprise that feeds artificial intelligence–driven technologies. China's citizens are effectively imprisoned inside an algorithmic bubble. In this vision, no more does the Party need to content itself with chasing dissidents before they inspire thousands or go to ground. Rather the goal is to harness the power of big data to predict and identify those people most likely to pose a threat to the Party—before they act. China's people are reduced to "a digital lineup of more than a billion people," and the whole of human society exists as a massive engineering problem where behavior can be "standardized." In this real-life, tech-fueled dystopia, the CCP seeks nothing less than the reprogramming of society.

It is almost as though Beijing has reimagined its citizens as customers of China, Inc. The Party has placed itself in the role of an amalgamated Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Venmo, and Google, but with the overweening repressive power of the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful political organization in the world. If the regime can hoover up enough data on everyone—their habits, histories, and hopes—then it can anticipate the demands of its citizens ahead of time. If you know what people want even before they do, then why would they ever desire a say in their own governance? Behaviors can be rewarded or penalized based on how they align with the Party's priorities. The tug-of-war between freedom and repression dissolves with optimization, and dissent becomes a nonsensical glitch to be deleted.

The CCP's algorithmic-driven formula produces two very different worlds, and Chin and Lin chart a course into each. The first is the prison state, the Panopticon of social theorist Jeremy Bentham's vision, where the many are under the surveillance of the few. Today this is most terrifyingly brought to life in the northwest province of Xinjiang, where the Party, in its...