After reading the John Lanchester review of two new books on China's surveillance totalitarianism (I wrote about the Lanchester book here, in connection with the NBA scandal), I bought one of the titles: We Have Been Harmonised: Life In China's Surveillance State, by Kai Strittmatter. As regular readers know, I am forced by my new book project to limit my readings to subjects related to totalitarianism. From Lanchester's review, I sussed that what's going on in China today is exactly what I fear is coming here, regarding "soft totalitarianism." Mind you, there is nothing "soft" about what is being done to the Uighurs of Xinjiang by that bloody regime in Beijing. But overall, the iron fist is very much in a velvet glove in communist China, thanks to technology.

I stayed up till after midnight last night reading Strittmatter's book. It's stunning stuff. The future I've been imagining all year, as I've worked on this project, already exists in China.

Excerpts from the book by Strittmatter, a German journalist who lived and worked in China:

The China we once knew no longer exists. The China that was with us for forty years – the China of 'reform and opening up' – is making way for something new. It's time for us to start paying attention. Something is happening in China that the world has never seen before. A new country and a new regime are being born. And it's also time for us to take a look at ourselves. Are we ready? Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear: over the coming decades, the greatest challenge for our democracies and for Europe won't be Russia, it will be China. Within its borders, China is working to create the perfect surveillance state, and its engineers of the soul are again trying to craft the 'new man' of whom Lenin, Stalin and Mao once dreamed. And this China wants to shape the rest of the world in its own image.