China Curtails Academic Freedom of Chinese Students and Their Professors in the U.S.
For more than a decade, we have witnessed an erosion of political freedoms and civil liberties across the world amidst a democratic backsliding toward autocracy, a system of government in which a single person (the autocrat) possesses absolute power to weaken institutions such as an independent judiciary that sustain the democratic system. At the same time, a surveillance-based economy, and anti-democratic threats this poses have thrived. This quote is from the abstract of an article on illiberalism I wrote that was published August 10, 2020. In the article I highlight China, where the mass surveillance of its citizenry is the most aggressive and invasive in the world. For example, using a range of personal data accessed by the government, citizens and businesses are supervised, judged, and rated as part of a “social credit system” that gives them “trustworthy” scores. Low scores ban them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by