Few in China have been as closely watched as the residents of Beijing were last week. Everywhere you went, your movements were tracked by Covid apps and code-scanning. Cameras on every corner, in every nook, blinked knowingly. The security system was on high alert, with every resident registered and accounted for.
While this ‘new normal’ was partly in place to enforce the zero-Covid policy, it was also to ensure social control and stability during the Party Congress, where Xi Jinping was anointed for another five — likely ten — years at the helm of the nation.
To understand this tightly controlled reality, topping our recommendations this month is a reported book on the surveillance state China has become. A close second is a wider lens take on the state of China — and how it has overreached in its ambition — along with an exposé of Beijing’s spy operations abroad, and three history books that put the changes of the present in perspective of the past.
The One to Read
Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control by Josh Chin and Liza Lin
Since the expulsion from China in 2020 of various foreign journalists (including one of this book’s authors) there has been a rising tide of big-picture-books by China-watchers-from-afar. So it is refreshing to read a work of journalism with close reporting from the ground — especially one as grippingly written, deeply researched and topically vital as this. Keeping a human grounding in the stories of those it effects, Wall Street Journal reporters Chin and Lin guide us through China’s surveillance industry, from cameras to bio-data to credit systems, as well as fascinating digressions on China’s “father of cybernetics” and how U.S. companies enabled China’s panopticon. Starting in Xinjiang with dystopian political and social control, the authors also take in utopian experiments in Hangzhou of surveillance in the name of crime and traffic oversight, arguing that “the same algorithmic controls can terrorize or coddle depending on who and where you are.”
September 6, 2022 | St. Martin’s Press. $25.49. | Buy.
The Shortlist
Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise by Susan Shirk
“Peaceful rise” has been a catchphrase of Beijing’s since the mid-00s, yet the notion is freshly under question. Shirk, a veteran China watcher whose earlier work Fragile Superpower argued how thin the line was that Beijing walked, now posits that Xi Jinping has overstepped it economically, militarily and diplomatically — and that he has abandoned China’s previously restrained foreign policy, instead overreaching in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea. Shirk traces this all back to the hubris of the Hu Jintao era as well as Xi’s consolidation of power, while warning about what it could portend for Sino-U.S. conflict in the future, where “interdependence could make the new cold war more dangerous than the old one.”
October 7, 2022 | Oxford University Press. $26.96. | Buy.
Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World by Alex Joske
As Beijing reaches abroad to promote its interests, it is no surprise that its influence and espionage operations have become more bold. But they have also been opaque. This exposé, sourced through Chinese intelligence interviews and documents, shows just how extensive China’s spy game has become, with a focus on the Ministry of State Security or MSS. Taking in influence ops targeted at U.S. and Australian politicians – as well as the longtail of targets including publishing, colleges, religious organizations and charities – Joske lays all this out in clear-headed prose. A wonkish read at times, but with plenty of color and impressive access.
October 11, 2022 | Hardie Grant. $20.69. | Buy.
Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China by John Delury
A flashback to older spy games: this time the U.S.’s attempts to subvert Mao’s government during the Cold War, and how those efforts often played into Beijing’s domestic propaganda and repression. Having laid the groundwork on postwar Sino-U.S. relations and CIA covert ops after the “loss of China” (to the CCP) — many involving the Hong Kong-based anti-communist group the “Third Front” — Delury delineates a failed mission into Manchuria which resulted in a young American being imprisoned in Mao’s China for 20 years, becoming a pawn in a wider game. An impressive work of scholarship, full of Cold War intrigue and marginalia amid a gripping historical narrative.
October 15, 2022 | Cornell University Press. $34.06. | Buy.
Fragile Cargo: China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City by Adam Brookes
Another gem of a China history book, that spoils us with a little-known story of cinematic proportions — that of the extraction of Beijing’s imperial art treasures from wartime China. With Japanese troops hours away from the capital’s palace museum, the curators send off delicate paintings, porcelain and artifacts on a journey of thousands of miles to safety, pinballed around China through bombed cities and rough wilderness. As carefully researched as it is engagingly written, this rollicking tale feels downright novelistic at times, with larger than life characters and exciting set scenes. A diverting read from another, even more dramatic, era.
September 1, 2022 | Chatto & Windus. $21.29. | Buy.
Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s by Julian Gewirtz
One would not imagine that a decade as recent as the eighties could be so difficult to record accurately. Yet that is the case in China, where an era of economic openness and political possibility has been buried deep under subsequent illiberalism. As this robust work of narrative scholarship shows, the Eighties was an era of free-ranging debate and diversity of opinion towards everything from opening the economy to political liberalization, and even the separation of Party and state and an independent judiciary. Gewirtz — who has also just published an impressive collection of poetry — illustrates how the upheaval of 1989 retroactively cast China’s illiberal turn as inevitable, while showing that it did not also need to be so.
October 18, 2022 | Harvard University Press. $27.09. | Buy.
In Case You Missed It
Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China by Karoline Kan
Karoline Kan’s family memoir is a good example of writing by a new generation of Chinese authors, from which we can only hope there will be more to come. Kan was born in 1989, and tells the story of how she first came to learn of the Tiananmen massacre during her birth year, as well as other coming-of-age struggles. Woven into these personal reflections are the stories of her family, from her grandparents’ experiences in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution to those of her parents and cousins as China emerged into capitalism’s brave new world.
March 12, 2019 | Hachette Books. $10.21. | Buy.
Alec Ash is the books editor for The Wire. He is the author of Wish Lanterns. His work has also appeared in The Economist, BBC, SupChina, and Foreign Policy. @alecash
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