China’s internal security budget doubled between 2008 and 2014—surpassing military spending in 2010—and has grown a third faster than overall government spending ever since.91 Half of China’s major cities have been put under grid-style management, a system in which every block is patrolled by a team of security officers and surveilled 24 hours a day by cameras.92 Now the government is rolling out a social credit registry that uses speech- and facial-recognition technologies to monitor each of China’s citizens constantly and punish them instantly. That system, the CCP says, will “allow the
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