Thanks to NetGalley, Perseus Books, and Public Affairs for an advance copy of The Perfect Police State, publication date June 29, 2021.

Did you like 1984? Did you like The Program by Suzanne Young? Any YA dystopian ever? Did you like the show (or short story) Minority Report? Well do I have a book for you!

There’s reprogramming camps! Social credit scores! A Big Brother government that watches your every move! An AI system that not only has facial recognition, but can help decide if you might commit a crime!

Except this is real life and it’s absolutely horrific.

The province of Xinjiang is located in the western most part of China, and is undergoing an ethnic cleanse/genocide, right under the noses of the rest of the world.

Somehow, between 2005 to present, China managed to put cameras every few feet and in the hands of every police officer, and even inside people’s homes. They created an AI that began to, more or less, think for itself while combing through billions of WeChat messages looking for criminal behavior. They invented “social credit” which ranks people on their trustworthiness - to China. They took everyone’s DNA and voiceprint. They built concentration/torture camps thinly veiled as ‘reprogramming camps’ for ‘terrorists’ (ethnic minorities). I could go on and on for paragraphs.

All in all this is a completely horrific if extremely well-researched and written book. Cain weaves Maysem’s tale of living through Xinjiang’s increasing police state, stint in the detention, and narrow escape from China with a lot of information about how China, Xinjiang, and President Xi created the Perfect Police State.

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)

5 Xi claims top spot, surpassing Nazis and Orwell

For the Uyghurs of China, just being a Uyghur is a crime. They are targeted, monitored, restricted, interned, brainwashed and destroyed. In Geoffrey Cain’s stomach-churning book The Perfect Police State, the tone is set right up front where readers learn that when a husband is disappeared, the state replaces him with one of their own, sleeping in the wife’s bed with her, ensuring she doesn’t try to change what teachers indoctrinate her children with, and that no criticism of China, the Communist Party or its chairman is ever breathed among them. If you can imagine that. The wife cannot ever complain, or her new man will simply denounce her and she will be disappeared too. The children parrot the propaganda they learned in school, and are taught to report their parents if they try to modify what they learned. (“Love our chairman, Xi Jinping.”) Worse, it is all downhill from there.

It is a story of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which China uses to predict “crimes” before they happen. The result is that nearly every Uyghur is a potential extremist, separatist or terrorist. They are plucked from their lives and interned in concentration camps at the whim of AI. The camps force them to sit through endless lectures on the glories of China, Chairman Xi and the party. They are forced to write lengthy reports on what they learned that day, sing the national anthem and patriotic songs, thank the chairman for all he does and has done, and self-criticize at length. For years on end.

Thanks to constant beatings, they learn to avoid speaking to anyone. They learn to show no facial expressions, ever. They learn they cannot trust anyone at all, especially not their cellmates, that no one can help them, and to give up: hope, optimism or for any kind of satisfaction in life. Their families cannot visit, because their location is secret and high security. If they can “prove” they aren’t terrorists, separatists or extremists to the satisfaction of the AI system, they might be released one day. But they will not recover.

Life on the outside is not much better. Uyghur cities are choking in “security” cameras. Police know every step they take and every move they make. They must scan their IDs everywhere they go, whether it is a market, a store, a gas station or a bus. Or a random police stop. Many are required to install wi-fi cameras in their own livingrooms such that there are no blind spots, and the cameras pick up every word they say. No conversation can be private. Parents must be careful what they say to their children, or whom they call or text, and how they treat the neighborhood spies who knock on their doors daily to inspect the premises for unusual things like, say, too many books. Not going for a habitual walk is reason enough for a knock on the door and a demand for an explanation. All of which will be reported to the police. And input to the AI system.

It’s all about the data. AI requires massive amounts of data to rummage through in order to determine and ran patterns, so every conceivable detail is collected, from photos to videos to fingerprints to blood samples and DNA. Police interviews are repetitive and endless. The AI decides by itself who is about to become a criminal, based on nothing anyone understands. It dictates who the police harass, who they bring in and how their lives will be ruined. Humans can be compassionate, so AI is in charge. Xi’s instruction to “Show no mercy” is not sufficient. Only the AI system can be trusted to implement his orders and his plans.

The AI (SkyNet), including the new, sophisticated facial recognition, is another fine product of American high tech, which works closely with this giant of a customer. A lot of very familiar names make their quarterly numbers selling extraordinarily intrusive systems to China. America has provided China’s state of the art mass genetic profiling system, which further nails not just the Uyghurs, but the Kazakhs and any other minorities polluting the nation. In return, China is now selling so-called City Safety systems in authoritarian countries all over the world, using its own achievements in creating a police state as proof of concept. For America to now criticize the Chinese for this unprecedentedly invasive system would be laughable if it wasn’t so horrifying. After reading The Perfect Police State, readers will understand why the USA has been so weak on helping the Uyghurs.

At work, Uyghurs get ousted from their jobs when imported Han Chinese workers complain about their very presence, just like Jews in Nazi Germany. They cannot travel without numerous permissions and stamps, and every leg of their trip requires scanning of their ID cards. Xinjiang has become Nazi Germany with an AI driver.

The ID cards provide additional data for social credit. This is a system where the good are rewarded with no punishment and the bad are denied what everyone else would consider normal. Inputs include everywhere the card has been scanned, as well as phone and text contents and social media posts and searches. Every bank card transaction, every financial move – everything – goes on the record as evidence somehow against them in their social credit score.

A guard at a store will scan their card and if it comes up “unsafe” or “untrustworthy”, he will deny them entry. In 2017, 17 million plane tickets were denied to Uyghurs that first year of the system. Untrustworthy is at the discretion of the AI system, and once again, no one knows what contributes to that classification. It just is.

As ever, the police are big on beatings, with spiked rubber batons the everyday weapon of choice. They are everywhere and involved in everything, as befits a police state. The state gives them plenty of opportunities, mostly arbitrary, but also using tactics like entrapment.

Cain gives the example of a mobile app appropriately called Zapya. It encourages users to download a free Koran and religious teachings, and to share it all with friends and family. All this data makes them and their networks instant targets for the police and fodder for AI. Uyghurs, who now make up just 2% of the population in their own native Xinjiang, make up 21% of the arrests there. (For years, China has encouraged more pure Han Chinese to move there and they have become the overwhelming majority, sidelining the natives in every aspect of the economy.)

For those who survive the reeducation camps and the slave labor assignments for various American products, there is only misery awaiting them on the outside. They remain fearful, antisocial and isolated. The birthrate among Uyghurs has plummeted, much to the delight of the government, because women can’t have normal social activity or family lives, and don’t especially want to impose it all on another generation of children. It is a kind of self-genocide without resorting to mass executions. Another improvement over old-style Nazism.

Xi Jinping’s landmark program, Belt and Road, is supposedly a project for China to make friends by spending gigantic sums along ancient trade routes. It is also used for forcing client governments to round up and deport Uyghur refugees residing in their countries. Because the police state doesn’t stop at Xinjiang’s borders. They want all Uyghurs back home and under total surveillance. (Prominent examples in the book are Egypt and Turkey.) They will also stoop to spoofing WeChat and WhatsApp accounts, pretending to be neighbors, friends and even the parents of the refugees. They tell them how wonderful things have become, how much they are missed, that it is now safe back home, and then encourage them to come home. If they fall for it, they will of course immediately be disappeared.

Xi has instilled and exploited fear in every corner of society. Uyghurs are just one of “five poisons” in the country. The others are democracy agitators, Taiwan supporters, Tibetans, and Falun Gong faithful. For ease of targeting, they are all suspected of “The Three Evils” - terrorism, separatism, and extremism. The hatred this engenders permeates the entire society, a totally successful implementation of police state purification practices, strongly supported by the majority and ever more nationalistic Han.

Cain has gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure the veracity of his stories. He repeatedly interviewed nearly 200 Uyghur refugees, mostly in Turkey. He was looking for any variations that might mean they were not quite truthful or that were covering up ulterior motives. He rejected a small number of them, and of course protected identities unless they were public figures already. He skillfully weaves one woman’s story in and out through the length of the book, breaking the intense misery of it all with sections on global politics and history. Otherwise, I think it would be unbearable. As it is, the book is powerful, damning and disgusting, a real life implementation of the worst brainwashing dictatorship fiction there is.

This horror of a policy is the pride of Xi Jinping, who leverages it for his own cult status. Far from being a liability, he is intensely proud of it, calling it “absolutely correct”. And “The superiority of our system will be fully demonstrated through a brighter future.” Xi has left both Hitler and Orwell in his dust.

David Wineberg

Uyghurs' plights became better known in recent years, as new data and accounts were made public, but there is still too little international awareness. That is why everyone should read this chilling and eye-opening book.

The author describes how China is creating for the first time a real-world version of the world described in Orwell’s 1984 - not that other states haven’t tried (think North Korea, Cambodia or East Germany) but they lacked sufficient technological sophistication. China took care of this, crafting a perfect surveillance system and using it to repress a whole region.

I have read a few articles about “the Situation” in Xinjiang before but this book still shocked me. Thanks to the combination of the passionate on-the-ground reporting and impeccable research (the author interviewed 168 people for this book, many of them Uyghur refugees), it offers a very detailed and moving description of the terror to which innocent people are subjected because of their ethnicity or faith.

Very interesting were also the parts describing how this sophisticated surveillance system was built - in large part with the help from the US tech industry. As I am interested in the new technologies, I was familiar with some of these issues but only now, seeing them presented in a coherent manner, I understood the whole story.

Thanks to the publisher, Perseus Books, PublicAffairs, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

"The Perfect Police State" by Geoffrey Cain is an important look into the increasing awareness of China's efforts to monitor its citizens, particularly the Uyghurs in western China. Cain points out that the Chinese government's presence in all aspects of Chinese life through digital and social monitoring is having disastrous on the autonomy and lives of Chinese citizens, and the Uyghurs in particular. The brave people who stepped forward to provide interviews and information for this book show that China's intent to eliminate Uyghurs reaches far beyond its borders. There is an attempt to harm and eliminate Uyghurs in other countries as well. I do wonder how the publication of a book like "The Perfect Police State" will lead to a further crackdown of what China considers dissidents, which is basically anyone who does not show complete adherence, real or not, to the "values" of the Chinese government. Sadly, as China continues to use financial incentives to integrate itself into many other countries in the world, I wonder what other nations can do to fight back against this extreme oppression and genocide. This is a really valuable read, and I hope this issue continues to be exposed.