You have probably heard of the old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”, used ironically with the implication that times that are interesting might also be dangerous or unpleasant.

Apparently the provenance of the phrase is the twentieth century West, not ancient China. Be that as it may, the insight expressed seems to match our era, full of dazzling possibilities but also dire – indeed existential – risks.

There has been a surge of interest in this topic over the past few years, with the establishment of a number of cross-disciplinary centres, such as this one at Cambridge University and this one at Oxford, devoted to identifying existential risks and thinking about how they might be addressed.

A group of British philosophers have initiated a closely related debate about whether we inhabit a historical hinge point in the evolution of humanity, a time of developments that will exert a disproportionate influence on the long-term future of our species. If so, what should that mean for our ethical perspectives, how we prioritize the present and future. This debate was initiated by the late British philosopher Derek Parfit, who claimed (in his book On What Matters):

We are living during the hinge of history … Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors.

The British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees is one of a number of prominent figures to have taken up the topic, writing a book (On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, 2018) that identifies a spectrum of dangerous possibilities from the commonly discussed ones (climate change, asteroids, pandemics) to ones that only a highly trained physicist can make sense of, such as the risks of particle accelerator experiments, like the ones being conducted at the Brookhaven National Lab in the US and CERN in Europe, that aim to replicate conditions a nanosecond after the Big Bang.

According to Rees some physicists have speculated that such experiments could create a black hole that would suck in everything around it, or alternatively that “quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called stangelets” that “under some hypotheses could, by contagion, convert anything else it encountered into a new form of matter, transforming the entire Earth into a hyperdense sphere about a hundred metres across”.

As if that is not dire enough, Rees also mentions the concern that some experiments might cause a “phase change” in the vacuum of space that would “rip the fabric of space” and cause a “cosmic calamity – not just a terrestrial one”.

Apparently scientists at these establishments have been pressured to address these concerns, and Rees thinks they have provided significant reassurance given the current state of theory. But what if the prevailing theories turn out to be wrong? How much reassurance is enough given the possibility, however miniscule, of such consequences?

Tough questions, to put it mildly, but at least in the liberal democracies these questions can be raised and the potential risks and benefits debated freely and openly. But what happens if the scientific and technological pre-eminence of such states is displaced by a rising totalitarian power, as could well be happening with the emergence of China as a technological and industrial superpower?

The Covid-19 pandemic has provided us with a foretaste of what this could mean. Instead of open and honest communication to the rest of the world about the nature and seriousness of this pandemic, there was secrecy and concealment, destruction of early viral samples, denial of outsiders access to raw data and lab records, the “disappearance” of courageous Chinese whistle blowers, and deliberate lying early on about the transmissibility of the virus.

The results of this have been calamitous. The regime effectively harnessed the ideology of Western self-loathing elites to vilify governments that acted early to close their borders as “racist” or “xenophobic” at the same time as they shut down internal travel to and from Wuhan while at the same time keeping international travel from Wuhan open.

The CCP regime has been able to corrupt international institutions like the WHO to support their lies about the virus’ potential for person to person spread, and about its likely origin from a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Even the Western scientific establishment has been compromised, as figures like Dr Antony Fauci and Dr Peter Daszak, a direct collaborator with the WIV, joined in the chorus of assertion rubbishing the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory”.

Daszak organized a letter from a number of scientific colleagues published in the Lancet supporting this view, as he concealed his own direct interest in the research.

We know that $US3.4 million of US government funds were channelled to the WIV to support activities that, as recently released emails between Fauci and others from early 2020 confirm, included the incredibly dangerous gain-of-function research. This research aimed to deliberately enhance the transmissibility and virulence of the virus.

Until very recently, almost all of the Western media, especially in the US, has faithfully echoed the “conspiracy theory” lie about the lab leak hypothesis, only changing their tune in the last few weeks as the evidence supporting it grew ever stronger. The conspiracy theory narrative was echoed by supposedly objective fact-checking websites, and social media censored it including Facebook which only reversed its ban after the Biden administration announced its own inquiry.

Over the past couple of weeks the tide has shifted. There now seems to be growing acceptance that the virus could well have been deliberately engineered by a regime that lies systematically. Can we exclude the possibility that this is part of a biological weapons development program?

Ponder the implications of all that. A rising totalitarian regime, a scientific and technological superpower, after creating a terrible risk to the world, is able not only to suppress dissent internally, but to control the actions of international institutions, and even to influence discourse within the Western democracies.

This poses a far greater threat to the democracies than was faced during the Cold War. In that conflict, there was a more or less hermetic separation between the two blocs. The threat posed by the Soviet bloc was almost exclusively military, apart from efforts at subversion that were largely ineffective during most of the conflict.

The CCP, by contrast, is deeply intertwined with the democracies, embedded in the interstices of our societies, controlling supply chains for all manner of things, heavily invested in key industries and infrastructure, able to get university presidents and vice-chancellors to do their bidding by implicit or explicit threats to cut of funding and fee-paying students, and able to mobilize sections of the Chinese diaspora to intimidate Chinese dissidents.

It is able to co-opt big corporations by threatening to cut off market access. This includes the entertainment and sport sectors desperate to get access to the huge Chinese internal market. Hence we see sports figures like LeBron James co-opted as CCP apologists – check out the truly abject spectacle of professional wrestler and action movie “tough guy” making a grovelling apology for inadvertently referring to Taiwan as a country, rather than a region of China.

However the most sinister aspect of the emerging CCP threat to democratic governance is the regime’s relentless efforts to develop a perfect totalitarian surveillance state, beyond even George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare in 1984.

I think most people are by now aware of the regime’s “social credit scheme”, that aims to monitor all aspects of its citizens behaviour and to punish or reward as it seems appropriate. The regime describes the aim of the plan, first announced in 2014 as part of the five-year plans, as being to: “broadly shape a thick atmosphere in the entire society that keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful”.

According to the chief executive of one of China’s leading finance companies, Ant Financial, which is integral to the social credit scheme, it “will ensure that bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction”.

That’s the goal, and the key enabling technology to bring this to fruition is Artificial Intelligence, which the regime aspires to achieve world leadership by 2030.

A recent article in The Atlantic magazine (The Panopticon is Already Here) sets out the scope of what is intended and, crucially, the regime’s intention to extend its surveillance net well beyond China’s borders. The account reads like a science fiction nightmare:

Xi’s pronouncements on AI have a sinister edge. Artificial intelligence has applications in nearly every human domain, from the instant translation of spoken language to early viral-outbreak detection. But Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance. He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.

In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens. China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.

The danger all this poses for the West was summarized in a speech (Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China) delivered to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet by John Garnaut, a former China correspondent and former principle international adviser to the department. Garnaut last year gave evidence to a US Senate committee in which he testified that “Beijing is brazenly and aggressively seeking to interfere with Western political systems”.

The speech was delivered in June 2017 but only recently made public. It is extraordinarily revealing as to the extent of the totalitarian reversion of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideology.

Initially an economics journalist, Garnaut had in the past tended to look at Chinese developments through an economic lens, but the scales have well and truly fallen from his eyes:

I’m here as someone who was born into the economics tribe and has been forced to gradually concede ground to the security camp. This retreat has taken place over the course of a decade, one story at a time, as I’ve had to accept that economic openness does not inevitably lead to political openness. Not when you have a political regime that is both capable and committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen.

Garnaut added this crucial point:

The challenge for us is that Xi’s project of total ideological control does not stop at China’s borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese students, tourists, migrants and especially money. It flows through the channels of the Chinese language internet, pushes into all the world’s major media and cultural spaces and generally keeps pace with and even anticipates China’s increasingly global interests.

The centres looking at existential risk that I mentioned above typically include not just risks that could eradicate all human life, but also ones that could lead to civilizational collapse, or that could transform it for the worse. This includes the possibility of a global totalitarian order being established.

The President of Microsoft Corporation has even made the extreme prediction that Orwell’s vision could come to pass by 2024 (though this seems quite a stretch) and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now chair of the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence has warned that:

We’re in a geo-political strategic conflict with China. The way to win is to marshal our resources together to have national and global strategies for the democracies to win in AI. If we don’t, we’ll be looking at a future where other values will be imposed on us.

Will the democracies have the will and wherewithal to do this? Where does the totalitarian menace fit into the broad spectrum of existential risks? Are there potential conflicts between the imperatives to prevent global dominance by a totalitarian hegemon and some approaches to climate change? I will take up these issues in next Friday’s topic of the week article.