This book examines how the Chinese Communist Party employs modern technology to monitor, influence, and regulate individual and collective behavior.

The book places these practices in historical context, tracing continuities from earlier systems of political and social control while examining how digital technologies have expanded the state’s capacity to observe, analyze, predict, and shape human activity. Methodologically, the volume draws primarily on Chinese-language open sources, including government policies and regulations, academic research, patents, and other primary materials. Its chapters examine interconnected domains of technological control, including physical and digital surveillance, internet and social-media governance, smartphone applications, propaganda, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and genomics, and brain-computer interfaces. Rather than treating these technologies as isolated developments, the book analyzes their growing integration through large-scale data collection, algorithmic analysis, and state governance systems. It also considers emerging technologies capable of extending political control beyond observable behavior to cognition, emotion, biology, and neural activity. The result is a multidisciplinary assessment of how technological innovation is changing the capabilities, reach, and potential future trajectory of political control in China.

This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics, security and technology, foreign policy and International Relations.

William C. Hannas is a Professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, CSET’s lead analyst, and a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service. He is author of Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (1997) and The Writing on the Wall (2003), principal author of Chinese Industrial Espionage (2013), and co-editor of China’s Quest for Foreign Technology (2020) and Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence (2022).

Huey-Meei Chang is Senior China S&T Specialist at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). She is co-editor of Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence (2023) and co-author of China’s Quest for Foreign Technology (2021). Her research focuses on Chinese technology transfer, brain-inspired computing, and artificial intelligence.