Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China’s surveillance state returns to the spotlight, rumors about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s health resurface, and three Chinese scammers are sentenced to death for pig-butchering schemes.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China’s surveillance state returns to the spotlight, rumors about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s health resurface, and three Chinese scammers are sentenced to death for pig-butchering schemes.

China’s Expanding Surveillance State

Two excellent New York Times pieces have recently put China’s surveillance state—at home and abroad—back in the spotlight. Unlike the foreign-media panic over social credit several years ago, the reporting underscores how monitoring and control have expanded in genuinely worrying ways under Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Security cameras are now omnipresent in Chinese cities. The foreign internet is effectively inaccessible, and once-common VPNs require a trip abroad to install. Informing on fellow students is on the rise. Much of life in China today is subject to identification requirements.

Real-name registration for mobile phones was introduced in 2010; though unregistered SIM cards remained available for years, today it’s nearly impossible to get mobile internet without an ID card. So-called no-show motels, which rented rooms without ID, have almost disappeared—a trend accelerated by the crackdown on Uyghur Muslims, who were among their biggest customers.

These technological surveillance networks are supplemented by boots on the ground. Monitoring a single prominent activist in 2010 took as many as 100 people—and he escaped anyway, despite being blind. By the end of the decade, security paranoia had put an armed police officer on every alley corner in central Beijing and half a dozen people running checkpoints at each subway stop.

Even so, China’s surveillance system has gaps, and many........

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