Chinese citizens in polluted Harbin, China.

The level of sheer apathy and acceptance in this country concerning the largest totalitarian state in the world never ceases to amaze me. Because of its dominant economic position and lack of overt military threat, China now seems to be regarded by most Americans as something of a huge, benign, modestly disagreeable presence. The fact that political dissent of any serious moment is effectively and ruthlessly suppressed by the state has gradually been overshadowed by the fact that our economies are so intertwined and mutually dependent. Without China manufacturing its cheap products for our citizens to buy our economy and standard of living would suffer a radical transformation for the worse.

So we tend towards ignoring the fact that the country itself is structured like something out of Orwell’s 1984 far more than any other major nation in the world. Its apologists habitually point to the relative contentment of the Chinese population acquiring more material comforts, as evidence that nothing is really amiss, that China is simply doing what it needs to do to pacify its enormous population, that China is uniquely Chinese in its culture, and perhaps we Americans should just mind our own business. I’ve never bought any of these arguments. I think China is, quite frankly, terrifying in its implications.

So Welcome to the China of the 21st Century:

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data. When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. It won’t be long before the police show up at your door.

The fact that one quarter of this planet’s people will soon be subject to this type of invasive control and suppression of free speech and free thought should be a wake-up call to anyone who values these things. As reported by Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond, writing for The Atlantic, these measures of social control being instituted by a thoroughly corrupt and all-powerful Chinese government have dark implications for the worlds’ existing democracies.

The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public safety,” it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.

The “algorithmic surveillance” is to be controlled, of course, by the security organs of the state, a state which already censors the Internet and Western journalists, prohibiting or severely restricting sites which would reveal political pluralism to its citizens. As a result, China’s level of internet freedom is the worst on the planet. Of course the real purpose of this is to vest the Communist Party with complete control of the country’s people. The advent of new digital tools to datamine and store data down to each individual citizen will increase that level of control tenfold. By 2020 this system will become mandatory. Each individual Chinese citizen able to be tracked will have a digital file constantly updating with their comments on social media (already under constant surveillance by the government), their economic habits, their opinions and their associations. Each individual’s “score” pursuant to an arbitrary determination of one’s loyalty to the regime will control the course of their lives. Posting news that the Chinese government doesn’t like will decrease your “score”, for example, and that may influence your ability to become employed or receive an education.

Even more worrying is that the government will be technically capable of considering the behavior of a Chinese citizen’s friends and family in determining his or her score. For example, it is possible that your friend’s anti-government political post could lower your own score. Thus, the scoring system would isolate dissidents from their friends and the rest of society, rendering them complete pariahs. Your score might even determine your access to certain privileges taken for granted in the U.S., such as a visa to travel abroad or or even the right to travel by train or plane within the country. One internet privacy expert warns: “What China is doing here is selectively breeding its population to select against the trait of critical, independent thinking.”

Of course China’s largest conglomerates which are either owned by or pay homage to the Totalitarian state are willing participants in this effort. AliBaba (described as China’s Amazon.com) and Tencent (operating a popular chat message service) already gather and store data which the government would necessarily require to assess these “scores.” The likelihood that any Chinese company would be unwilling to provide such data to a Police State is exactly zero.

The Chinese government does not release data showing exactly what the effects of this type of scoring are. But some metrics are available. From Scientific American:

China’s Chief Justice Zhou Qiang reported 8.42 million instances where “discredited” people were blocked from buying airline tickets. Individuals with “bad” social credit scores were also banned from buying train tickets 3.27 million times.

Beyond the “scoring” of its citizens China is taking steps to implement a vast network of electronic surveillance to track their every move. In 2015, one official arm of the government announced it was “calling for” (read: “implementing”) a national video surveillance network. There are 176 million surveillance cameras in China today. The entire city of Beijing, for example, is under constant government surveillance. By 2020 there will be 450 million cameras. Try to imagine that.

The stated goal of all of these measures, like the stated goal of any Dictatorship, is to prevent “crime.” In reality what it does is cement the absolute authority of the Party in perpetuity and to intimidate and prevent any type of dissent. Who would dream of expressing any criticism of any government action when that criticism was absolutely known to the government, would result in either arrest or unemployability, and would certainly destroy one’s social mobility and taint that of one’s family? The answer is: No One.

We have already seen examples of the sordid intersection of digital technology and the tools of government in the pervasive and illegal surveillance programs uncovered by Edward Snowden and others, in government monitoring and “facial recognition” to identify political protesters and monitoring of social media, abetted by corporate giants as diverse as AT&T, Verizon and Facebook. China is giving us an example of just how far that intersection could go.