Until recently in Silicon Valley, it was taken as an article of faith that technology could enhance democracy. “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters,” Twitter C.E.O. Jack Dorsey declared in 2007. That may be true to some extent—in many countries, services like Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever to organize, and have eliminated many media gatekeepers. But in China, which is undergoing a tech boom, innovation seems to be expanding in the opposite direction: instead of allowing for free and open platforms, the country is implementing an authoritarian tech dystopia. Already, local Chinese governments and schools have employed surveillance technology to do everything from fine residents for jaywalking to pinpoint an alleged thief in a 20,000-person crowd. It is, as The New York Times reports, a chilling alternative vision of the future—and one that will almost certainly go global. While the use of facial-recognition software has inspired some backlash in the U.S., China has rapidly embraced A.I.-based surveillance technologies to police its 1.4 billion people. By 2020, analysts estimate that China will have nearly 300 million cameras installed, and Chinese police will spend $30 billion on surveillance technology. “This is potentially a totally new way for the government to manage the economy and society,” Martin Chorzempa, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the Times. “The goal is algorithmic governance.”

China, a semi-authoritarian state, is in a unique position to implement such technology, even if it hasn’t yet done so on a mass scale. Political dissent is repressed. Restrictions on Internet use limit the information available to the public. And with few laws in place to protect consumer privacy, many tech start-ups are already handing their data over to the government, enabling a dystopian marriage of human policing and surveillance. In Zhengzhou, law-enforcement officers use facial-recognition glasses to apprehend drug smugglers at train stations. In the western part of the country, mass-surveillance technology is used to track members of the Uighur Muslim minority, mapping out relationships with friends and family. Information on plane trips and hotel stays is readily available. A start-up called Eyecool gives more than 2 million facial images every day to a big-data policing system called—perhaps a bit heavy-handedly—Skynet.

The human psyche has played a crucial role in the success of China’s new system. Last summer, when police posted a large, outdoor screen showcasing the photos, names, and government I.D. numbers of people who sped or jaywalked at a certain intersection, the number of incidents quickly declined. “If you are captured by the system and you don’t see it, your neighbors or colleagues will, and they will gossip about it,” Guan Yue, a spokeswoman, told the Times. “That’s too embarrassing for people to take.” And while the technology itself may only be partially effective right now, the perception of surveillance has an equally powerful effect. Bureaucratic inefficiencies have so far prevented the country from creating a truly national surveillance network: cameras on one block, or in one town, may not be functional in another, preventing the state—for now, anyway—from fully tracking its citizens. But that’s not necessarily common knowledge to China’s citizens. “The whole point is that people don’t know if they’re being monitored,” Chorzempa explained. “And that uncertainty makes people more obedient.”

Despite some setbacks, China’s hunger for surveillance appears to be fueling an investment boom. Companies like SenseTime, Megvii, and Yitu are raising hundreds of millions of dollars with investments from traditional players like Tiger Global Management and Temasek, as well as state-sponsored funds created by the country’s leadership. Some of these companies are already expanding beyond China’s borders: at Yitu, an artificial-intelligence start-up whose Shanghai headquarters includes a network of surveillance cameras linked to a facial-recognition system that tracks and monitors its own employees, talks of Southeast Asian and Middle East expansion are already underway. Similar efforts are taking root in countries like India, where the government is collecting biometric data and linking it to things like welfare programs and pensions. For certain services, biometric registration is mandatory, resulting in the creation of one of the largest stores of biometric data in the world. Countries like Britain, Russia, and the Philippines are studying India’s efforts, according to the Times.