A Communist regime has to be totalitarian. It cannot allow any degree of freedom. It cannot permit dissent.

China has experimented with capitalism. Now it is reverting to full tyranny:

Xi Jinping is not merely an authoritarian leader …  He is taking China back to totalitarianism as he seeks Mao-like control over all aspects of society.

So writes Gordon Chang at Gatestone, explaining how the Chinese state is enabled by technology to become like Orwell’s Big Brother with total surveillance of the population all the time.

By 2020, Chinese officials plan to have about 626 million surveillance cameras operating throughout the country. Those cameras will, among other things, feed information into a national “social credit system”.

That system, when it is in place in perhaps two years, will assign to every person in China a constantly updated score based on observed behaviors. For example, an instance of jaywalking, caught by one of those cameras, will result in a reduction in score.

Although officials might hope to reduce jaywalking, they seem to have far more sinister ambitions, such as ensuring conformity to Communist Party political demands. In short, the government looks as if it is determined to create what the Economist called “the world’s first digital totalitarian state“. …

Chinese officials … tell us the purpose of the initiative is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

That description is not an exaggeration. Officials prevented Liu Hu, a journalist, from taking a flight because he had a low score. …

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” Liu said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

The system is designed to control conduct by giving the ruling Communist Party the ability to administer punishments and hand out rewards. …

Hou Yunchun, a former deputy director of the State Council’s development research center, said at a forum in Beijing in May that the social credit system should be administered so that “discredited people become bankrupt”. …

Not every official has such a vindictive attitude, but it appears that all share the assumption, as the dovish Zhi Zhenfeng of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said, that “discredited people deserve legal consequences”.

President Xi Jinping, the final and perhaps only arbiter in China, has made it clear how he feels about the availability of second chances. “Once untrustworthy, always restricted,” the Chinese ruler says.

What happens, then, to a country where only the compliant are allowed to board a plane or be rewarded with discounts for government services? No one quite knows because never before has a government had the ability to constantly assess everyone and then enforce its will. The People’s Republic has been more meticulous in keeping files and ranking residents than previous Chinese governments, and computing power and artificial intelligence are now giving China’s officials extraordinary capabilities. …

Chinese leaders have long been obsessed with what then-President Jiang Zemin in 1995 called “informatization, automation, and intelligentization”, and they are only getting started. Given the capabilities they are amassing, they could, the argument goes, make defiance virtually impossible. …

Xi Jinping … evidently believes the Party must have absolute control over society and he must have absolute control over the Party. … Already Chinese officials are trying to use artificial intelligence to predict anti-Party behavior.

Are all rulers tempted to control the population totally? Without constitutional restraints, how many democracies would find their leader turning into a monarch? Especially if technology makes it possible.

We can all too easily imagine a Barack Obama, a Jerry Brown, a Bernie Sanders, a Cory Booker succumbing to the totalitarian temptation.

Technology might even make liberal democracy and free-markets “obsolete” writes Yuval Noah Harari of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Atlantic. “The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place — may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.

Gordon Chang continues:

The dominant narrative in the world’s liberal democracies is that tech favors totalitarianism.

And he warns:

Beijing is almost certain to extend the social credit system, which has roots in attempts to control domestic enterprises, to foreign companies. Let us remember that Chinese leaders this year have taken on the world’s travel industry by forcing hotel chains and airlines to show Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China, so they have demonstrated determination to intimidate and punish. Once the social credit system is up and running, it would be a small step to include non-Chinese into that system, extending Xi’s tech-fueled totalitarianism to the entire world.

World-domination has always been the ultimate aim of Communism, from Karl Marx to the United Nations’ Man-Made Global Warmists.

So the wonderful inventions of free men in a free country, who had the spare time and acquired the capital to develop their ideas, are proving the best instruments for the destruction of freedom!  And oddly enough, most of the Inventors have no objection to abusive exploitation of their technologies. The inventors and tycoons of Twitter, Google, Facebook are adamantly socialist-minded.

Invention is individual. It happens only in freedom. Ironically, once total control is achieved by means of the great technological inventions of our age, there will be no more invention.

Communist totalitarian societies are stagnant. And stagnation is a long slow death.