Pei reveals the vast machinery of surveillance and repression in China, fueled by leaders’ fear, distrust, and paranoia.
An authoritative study of China’s surveillance system and its ability to strangle any possible dissent.
The era when observers thought that democratic reform in China might be possible is long gone. In fact, writes Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of China’s Crony Capitalism and China’s Trapped Transition, surveillance and repression have become even more prevalent in the past two decades, and they continue to grow. The current trend is toward the use of sophisticated technology, including artificial intelligence, but the system is built on a bureaucratic, labor-intensive infrastructure dating from the Mao years. Much of China’s central government data is secret, but Pei managed to piece together the architecture from public documents, leaked reports, and interviews with exiles. A sizable portion of the surveillance occurs at the grassroots level, with battalions of informants reporting to local police. Above that level is a series of agencies that analyze the data and undertake detailed surveillance and coercion when needed, and high-level Communist Party committees provide oversight and coordination. The system adds up to what Pei calls “preventive repression,” aimed at identifying and dealing with dissent before it can become organized opposition. Most of China’s population seems willing to accept ongoing surveillance in return for social stability and economic growth. The system is extremely expensive, but Xi Jinping and his coterie are willing to pay it. Pei notes, however, that the size and effectiveness of the surveillance system might blind leaders to other threats, such as corruption and socioeconomic inequities. This book is as comprehensive an examination of the subject as possible, and the author presents his findings without hyperbole. He lets the facts speak for themselves, and they tell a scary story.
Pei reveals the vast machinery of surveillance and repression in China, fueled by leaders’ fear, distrust, and paranoia.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780674257832
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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