After Edward Snowden’s leaks about America’s mass surveillance program, academics and experts were stunned by its huge size and sophisticated technology. Leading scholars argued that the challenge was not merely the practical question of getting the right balance between security and privacy, but the more fundamental political question of the choice between a democratic polity and a police state, and of European resistance to American power. One thing was curiously missing from such critical resistance: the example of mass surveillance in China, which not only tracks what people do, but through its new ‘Social Credit’ system more actively guides people’s actions not only through censorship and sanctions, but also through rewards. Since China is at the forefront of innovation that combines the technological engineering of big data and social engineering of the control of everyday life, this paper will examine how the visual and the virtual interact in China’s domestic space, and how the PRC is exporting cyber technology and norms of global governance as part of its campaign for cyber sovereignty. With this in light, the paper will ask: how do global governance and resistance work in the cyber-age? What is the relation of the visual and the virtual with the explosion of social media activity on the Internet, which now is the target of mass surveillance and guidance by the state and corporations? What happens when Europeans look beyond the US to take China seriously as a technological great power that is promoting an alternative social order?

William A. Callahan is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research examines the interplay of culture and policy in China and Asia, and considers the overlap of domestic and international politics, especially in Chinese foreign policy. His most recent book is China Dreams: 20 Views of the Future (Oxford University Press, 2013), and his documentary films include ‘Mearsheimer vs. Nye on the Rise of China’ (2015), which is on TheDiplomat.com, and ‘toilet adventures’ (2015), which was shortlisted for a major award by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, and 'China Bound, 1964' (2018). He is currently working on a book project ‘Visualizing International Politics’, and a short documentary film, 'Great Walls'.