A few years ago, Chongyi Feng arrived in Beijing from Australia and checked into a hotel.

Dr Feng, who has a PhD in Chinese history, had a lunch meeting planned with some local human rights lawyers.

"After less than half an hour, the secret police knock on my door," Dr Feng, an associate professor in China studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, said.

He was urged to abandon his meeting. If not, he was told, he and his guests would be arrested.

"How do you stop me from eating lunch," he wondered, in an interview this week with the ABC.

"That is very comprehensive control."

The level of state surveillance in the world's second-largest economy is well known. So is the Communist Party's ability to control the narrative through its state-owned news media, state-censored social media, state-published textbooks and army of information censors.

We have seen that again this week during the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Truth has been absent in what the journalist Louisa Lim called The People's Republic of Amnesia.

But there's a weird confluence of history going on here. That's because this week was not just the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

It was the anniversary of 1984.

"He himself never lived in a totalitarian society," Dr Feng said of the English writer George Orwell, whose most famous novel was published 70 years ago this weekend.

"I lived in that society. I have to say that Orwell was an absolute genius. He got everything right."

1984 is becoming more relevant as it ages

Everybody knows 1984 was prescient. The term "Orwellian" is a cliche of political journalism, and this week's raids on the home of a News Corp reporter and the Sydney offices of the ABC had some in the media asking whether Australia was taking cues on transparency from more repressive regimes.

But while the novel might have predicted Cold War factions and political nonsense-speak, it's only gotten more on point in the past few years, and that's because of technology.

It listens to you and follows you. It knows what you are going to write before you write it. It knows your political beliefs and your relationship status.

The 1964 Penguin edition of 1984, which was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1949. ( Flickr: jonathan229 )

"Alexa or Siri and their ilk may be fads, but the technology now exists, and so then does a new kind of power," says Robert Hassan of the school of culture and communication at the University of Melbourne.

Our Big Brother is not a faceless government orb. It's a handful of sneaker bros in Palo Alto, California.

British writer DJ Taylor, author of the forthcoming 1984: A Biography, says it's "extraordinary" how many things Orwell got right.

"I can't see Orwell becoming less relevant, the way the world is changing at the moment," he told the ABC.

"If anything, it will just become more so."

'It wasn't a prophecy, it was a warning'

The rewriting of history, main character Winston Smith's job in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, feels like the logical endpoint of the current PR-ification of public discourse.

Everything that moves has a media manager. Everything is massaged. "Weasel words," the critic Don Watson called them, though they are not dissimilar from the "newspeak" of Oceania.

The book coined the terms "groupthink" and "enemy of the people", the second of which US President Donald Trump uses regularly to describe the media.

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In the week after Mr Trump's inauguration in 2017, sales of 1984 surged.

His first press secretary Sean Spicer insisted Mr Trump attracted the largest crowd ever to welcome a new president, despite evidence to the contrary.

When the White House was challenged on that lie, adviser Kellyanne Conway invented a new term: "alternative facts". That sounds a lot like Orwell's "doublethink".

"There's a kind of bare-facedness about it," Taylor said.

"Even if the evidence doesn't support it, it is still true because we say so."

Orwell intended 1984, which took him five-and-a-half years to write and was published as his health was waning, to be a satirical novel that exposed the lunacy of totalitarianism.

That it is now being quoted verbatim by the President of the United States does not exactly fill Taylor with confidence.

"Orwell himself said it wasn't a prophecy; it was what he called a warning."