Surveillance State with Liza Lin
Fresh out of the studio, Liza Lin, senior correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, discuss the key themes of her new book, Surveillance State, co-authored with Josh Chin. We began the conversation on the motivation and inspiration behind the book and dived deep into the key stories of how AI and digital tools are adopted to maintain social control in China. Last but not least, Liza shares how these technologies developed by China are now exported across the world, foreshadowing the war between different political ideologies.
"China's vision is basically to use the big data that it's harvested to enable its government to be just more nimble and more reactive to the demands of its citizens. So China's idea is, you know, if we collect enough data, we can spot problems and nip them in the bud even before they occur. Or we can spot, for example, a national security threat and nip that in the bud even before a terrorist is able to do anything." - Liza Lin
Introduction
- Liza Lin, Senior Correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and co-author of “Surveillance State”
- Since our last conversation, what have you been up to?
Surveillance State: Inside China's quest to launch a new era of social control
- Surveillance State by Liza Lin and Josh Chin (Amazon, Macmillian)
- To start, what is the motivation and inspiration behind writing this book?
- Who is the intended audience of the book?
- What are the key themes of the book?
- Can you talk about how the digital surveillance industry with computer vision and AI rose in China which led up to what it is today?
- What are the key companies that are providing the digital surveillance industry, specifically in the hardware and software components?
- What are the biggest misconceptions from Western Media about the surveillance state that China brought about?
- The irony that I have learned from your book is that some of the concepts that the Chinese have adopted came from the US. Can you describe a few of those which were adopted in China?
- Technology is neutral and it depends on how governments are using them. Specifically for China, while we read a lot about the “black mirror” part of the digital authoritarian culture, what are the applications in which these technologies turn out to be sinister?
- Let’s turn to how it can be helpful, for example, child trafficking.
- What I find interesting about the book is the story of Hangzhou and how they built on the concept of a smart city in 2016, where Alibaba made an AI-powered platform, City Brain, to help the government to optimize everything from traffic to water management. Can you tell the story of how it is being put together and what has been solved and not solved?
- The technical implementation for social credit is pitched by Lin Jinyue, an American-educated expert in credit systems from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Can you talk about the origins of how the concept of social credit came together and what it is meant to solve initially?
- The ACLU in the US and many western outlets conflated Alibaba’s Sesame Credit with the social credit system. How does the social credit system work in actuality?
- Of course, when there is a large-scale implementation of the social credit system, there will be bugs and part of the reason lies with the black lists. Can you talk about the story of Zhuang Daohe, a legal scholar in Hangzhou and how he ended up suing the Chinese regulator?
- We observe how the US has responded with sanctions first with export controls on semiconductors and recently stopping NVIDIA from exporting the AI chips. Will this slow down the development of digital surveillance in China?
- How are these digital surveillance technologies exported out of China and where are they used now?
- What is the future for these technologies in digital surveillance and what are its implications for the world order with the rise of China and the decline of democracies in Europe and the US?
Closing
- Any recommendations that have inspired you recently?
- Liza's recommendations: Erich Schwartzel's "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the battle for cultural supremacy"
- How can my audience find you?