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What does a superpower do when pandas, private persuasion at the highest echelons and trumpeting the value of “harmony” are no longer winning global friends?

If you’re the leaders of increasingly autocratic China, you clamp down, especially on your own people. You spread an evermore elaborate system of surveillance, monitoring and pressure on citizens in your home country and in foreign lands.

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You press your overseas contingent, including Chinese students you have in Canada, to attack disapproving speakers. You suddenly toss two Canadians in secret isolation cells in China and, this week, accuse them of spying. And then you dismiss Canadians as “white supremacists” if they get riled or defend the lawful arrest and bail of a Huawai executive in Vancouver.

Back home, you develop an invasive mobile phone app and make sure its downloaded by most of the 90 million members of your ruling Communist party. You take DNA samples from millions of the Uyghur Muslims in China, because genetics can be used to track their moves. You bully Chinese journalists at home and abroad.

And it works.

State intimidation and electronic surveillance can be highly effective, no matter which regime brings it into oppressive play.