The book grew out of an investigation into Chinese state surveillance that the Wall Street Journal launched in 2017 after we stumbled onto a Chinese startup that was raising millions of dollars to develop facial-recognition systems for police. That piece went on to win a Gerald Loeb Award for international reporting. After we finished that initial wave of reporting, it was clear that what the Communist Party was trying to do with technology in China was the kind of tectonic development that called for the deep excavation you can only really do with a book.

We originally started working together because we had complementary reporting beats. Liza was plugged into China’s tech industry, and I’d spent years covering Chinese politics. We needed knowledge of both to properly tackle state surveillance as a topic. But in the course of reporting, we discovered that our skills fit together in other ways. Liza is a whiz at getting important people to tell her things they probably shouldn’t. Often, I was able to set the gems of insight she uncovered in the right context for them to shine a bit brighter. When it came time to write the book, we divided up the chapters based on expertise, but we stuck to the same dynamic. There was plenty of give and take, but we managed to achieve one of our primary goals, which was to keep the voice and the quality of reporting consistent throughout.

We don’t intend this as an anti-surveillance Jeremiad. There are plenty of those out there already. Instead, the hope is the book will give people a way to grasp state surveillance in its totality—its seductive side as well its nightmarish one—so that they’re prepared to face a future in which these technologies are pervasive, and hopefully shape it in ways that preserve as much of our humanity as possible.

Unfortunately, censorship in China is now so sophisticated that probably only a handful of people there will get to see the book. For those few, we hope it helps them make a little more sense of the new world they’re living in. To Americans, the book stands as a warning. China’s surveillance state was fertilized by technology and ideas produced in the U.S. The more our commitment to democracy withers, the likelier we are to see something similar sprout out of American soil.