Busybodies, backed by AI, are restoring the party’s visibility

IN 2018 XI JINPING visited one of Shanghai’s grandiose new structures, a ponderous, low, glass-clad building that had been used mainly as an exhibition centre. A space inside had been taken over by the district government for an entirely different purpose. On one wall a vast screen showed live feeds from street cameras. With the help of artificial intelligence, it could alert officials to problems as subtle as a builder not wearing a safety-helmet or a flat being rented by too many people. They nicknamed the system that supplied this information the “big brain”.