Beware the Authoritarian Biopolitics of the AI Age by Tao Dongfeng

"So what can we do today to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships?"

Today’s edition opens with an introduction by Kristin Shi-Kupfer, Professor for Contemporary China Studies at Trier University. Kristin is also a Senior Associate Fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS). Following the conclusion of a joint University of Trier–MERICS project on Chinese debates, “China Spektrum”, Kristin’s most recent interdisciplinary project, “Chinaratrack”, focuses on analysing policy narratives across different Chinese media channels. Very grateful to her for contributing to this edition. — Jacob and Thomas

China has been pushing and applying artificial intelligence (AI) on a scale—and across a spectrum of domains—unmatched by any other country. Nevertheless, Chinese cadres, scholars and practitioners have raised concerns about the challenges posed by AI.

Chinese entrepreneurs have warned against the known and unknown harm of AI systems, with some even joining the international open letter calling for a pause in training advanced AI systems in March 2023. On platforms such as the Q&A forum Zhihu, Chinese internet users discuss scenarios in which AI turns against humans—sometimes even framed as a form of “salvation” amid a morally degenerate human society.

Taking a similarly critical stance on human nature, Tao Dongfeng offers a unique perspective on AI as both a path to, and tool of, a new techno-totalitarianism and fascism. This will come as no surprise to those familiar with Tao, a professor for contemporary Chinese language and literature with an extensive body of sharp-penned, politically liberal leaning essays and articles. In the context of Xi Jinping’s regime surveilling and cracking down on people like Tao, his essay is courageous, deeply moving and disturbing at the same time.

“If one wants to make someone submit to a certain ideology, a certain doctrine, or to the absolute rule of a certain ruler, and maintain absolute loyalty, there is no need for ideological education or threats of violence; simply implanting a tiny, completely invisible chip is sufficient.”

One may wonder how, and why, a sentence like this—indeed, an article like this—can be published and, at the time of writing, remain accessible on the Chinese internet. One explanation might be that the authorities want to observe how people comment on and react to it. Certainly, Tao is a master of “playing edge-ball” [擦边球] a metaphor for the skilful art of pushing the limits of what is politically permissible without crossing the boundaries.

Tao predominantly references foreign examples and works, including publications on Nazi fascism, and fiction such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The only direct Chinese reference is to the obviously absurd Cultural Revolution era claim that someone with a “proletarian worldview” should find cow dung fragrant and roses foul-smelling.

Picking up on Yuval Noah Harari’s question,“Why fascism is so tempting?”, he points to the disturbing nature of algorithms—and to the future troubles they may pose for democracies, offering common ground for the Chinese leadership without compromising on his viewpoints.

Tao’s authenticity and humility—on display at the very beginning of his essay with his humorous self-reflections—triumph over any AI system or one-party-dictatorship, because they ignite the soul’s capacity to overcome fear and despair.

— Kristin Shi-Kupfer

Key Points

1. Algorithmic systems no longer merely observe what we do; they can also track emotional shifts and even bodily signals such as heart rate, enabling prediction and manipulation that can outstrip self-knowledge.

2. Technologies marketed as therapeutic fixes, such as the “sobriety chip” [戒酒芯片], can serve as a soft entry point for a new mode of governance.

3. Unlike classical ideological work, which operates through language, persuasion and coercion, AI-era governance can bypass consciousness and intervene at the level of physiology, sensation and feeling.

4. In Foucauldian terms, this can be understood as biopolitics [生命政治]: rule exercised through the administration and management of life itself.

5. Medicine and “health” become key instruments of power, entailing both the politicisation of life [生命的政治化] and the vitalisation of politics [政治的生命化].

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6. Nazi fascism shows how biopolitics can become lethal when political power fuses with biological rationales and governance becomes the “scientific” management of life and death.

7. Within this framework, technology does not replace political authority; it enables, amplifies and optimises it, allowing power to act with greater reach, efficiency and precision.

8. Brave New World offers a stable variant of such rule: order sustained not through repression alone, but through engineered satisfaction, emotional pacification and the erosion of genuine human bonds.

9. The core danger is not “technology” itself, but authoritarian power empowered by technology [技术赋能的极权主义].

10. As data replaces land and machinery as a resource of power, politics increasingly becomes a struggle over data flows, turning information concentration from a liability into an advantage.

Name: Tao Dongfeng (陶东风)
Born: July 1959 (age: 66)
Position: Professor, School of Humanities, Guangzhou University
Previously: Professor, Capital Normal University
Other: Editor-in-chief of the Cultural Studies (文化研究) series; Vice Chair of the Chinese Association of Literary and Art Theory
Research focus: Contemporary Chinese Literary Thought and Cultural Studies; Literary Theory
Education: PhD Beijing Normal University (1991); BA Zhejiang Normal University (1982)
Experience Abroad: Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.; German Development Institute (Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik); India’s National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP); Pakistan’s Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI)

TAO DONGFENG: BEWARE THE BIOPOLITICS OF THE AI AGE
9 December 2025
Tao Dongfeng (陶东风)
Published in Essays (随笔), Issue 6, 2025
Translated by Cherry Yu
(Illustration by OpenAI’s DALL·E 3)

I. The Power of Modern Technology

Algorithms can record precisely my every utterance and action, even every emotional fluctuation and every heartbeat. They understand me better than I understand myself. Such algorithms can not only predict each individual’s decisions but also manipulate their emotions.

Recently, I came across an “encouraging” [令人振奋] piece of news on a WeChat public account called News Breakfast: Hangzhou has completed its first implantation surgery of a “sobriety chip” [戒酒芯片], after which a recipient claimed that “seeing alcohol is like seeing plain water”.

I call this piece of news “encouraging” because I, too, struggle with alcohol [consumption] and often harbour thoughts of quitting. Although my dependence has not reached the point of drinking to excess every time, I do frequently end up drinking more than I should or getting tipsy. Given my family history of hypertension and heart disease, this behaviour is not merely unhealthy but life-threatening, effectively “playing with fire” [玩命]. Yet, as the old saying goes, “ingrained habits are hard to change” [积习难改]. If, as News Breakfast claims, implanting a chip can effortlessly and completely eliminate alcohol cravings, should one consider giving it a try?

If the “sobriety chip” pertains to the control and modification of physiological and lifestyle habits, then another equally “encouraging” piece of news touches on psychological and emotional regulation. Allegedly, a recent brain experiment conducted at Stanford University has demonstrated that AI combined with brain‑computer interfaces can treat depression: “As long as a ‘seed of happiness’ is planted in the brain, a person’s soul can be cured. In the age of AI, it is possible not only to shape the intelligence of the world, but also to completely control human emotions.” [Note: It is unclear which study the author is referring to here.]

This news also made my heart race [怦然心动]. Whether due to temperament or some other reason, I unfortunately find it hard to shake off negative emotions. I am not immune to what might be called a petty bourgeois sentimentality [小资产阶级情调], feeling moved to tears by the passage of time or saddened by parting, much like in the line, “where sorrow prevails, flowers weep; where parting pains, birds startle” [Note: 感时花溅泪，恨别鸟惊心, a line from Tang-dynasty poet Du Fu, commonly used to express heightened emotional sensitivity to political turmoil and personal separation].

Although it has not reached the level of clinical depression, I am still far from that “brave new world” of being happy every day. Should one try an AI-brain computer interface to sweep away one’s negative emotions once and for all, bidding farewell forever to anxiety, low mood, melancholy and resentment, and live forever in the “sunlit days” [阳光灿烂的日子]?

Modern technology is indeed astonishingly powerful [神通广大] and seemingly omnipotent [无所不能]. Today’s life sciences, artificial intelligence and digital technologies have developed to the point where they can, through methods such as chip implantation, genetic modification and organ transplantation, completely control or alter human skin colour, gender, bodily sensations, tastes and preferences, biological or natural attributes once thought to be bestowed by “Heaven” [老天爷] and merely accepted as given. Quitting alcohol or smoking has become a breeze [易如反掌]; altering sex or species is now a piece of cake [小菜一碟]; even eternal youth, immortality and perpetual happiness no longer appear to be pure myth.

II. Biopolitics in the Age of AI

But is this truly a desirable “brave new world”? Who can guarantee that it will not turn out to be an upgraded version of fascism in the age of AI?

The concept of “biopolitics”, first proposed by Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén in the 1920s and later developed by Foucault in the 1970s, refers to the fusion of politics (the state) and life (the organism), signifying the politicisation of life (生命的政治化) or the biologicalisation of politics (政治的生命化). It describes how political power intervenes in the care and governance of life, becoming what is termed “biopower”. Biopolitical theory embodies the intersection and integration of biology (the theory of organisms) and political science (the theory of the state). Here, “life” typically does not refer to individual lives, but to life in the demographic sense of a state’s population.

In works such as Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault pointed out that various signs in the eighteenth century indicated that the state had begun to treat the life of the entire population as an object of governance. At the same time, medicine moved beyond a purely professional concern with population health and became a tool for managing the population in line with the political needs of state development, a technology of power that Foucault termed “biopolitics”.

Nazism represents modern racist biopolitics, a form of biologised racism that transformed the historical discourse of racial struggle by assigning state power the responsibility for the life of the entire population. As Foucault noted in Society Must be Defended: “It is indeed the emergence of this biopower that inscribes [racism] in the mechanisms of the State”.

The primary function of this form of racism was “to introduce a break into the domain of life … [namely] the appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races”—that is, to divide the population into the healthy and the disabled, those who should live and those who should die, on the basis of purported biological and medical criteria.

In the early years of Nazi rule, this biopolitical power was not primarily used to exterminate Jews, but rather to “deal with” [解决] those within Germany deemed “unworthy of life”. Through measures such as “forced sterilisation” and “euthanasia”, the regime accelerated the deaths of those regarded as “burdens” (whether physical or mental) to the nation and the race. These acts of killing were euphemistically described as “liberation”, “merciful death”, or “assisted dying”, and glorified as a grand historic undertaking [千秋伟业] for the “purification of the people”.

As documented by Götz Aly in Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, between 1939 and 1945 approximately 200,000 Germans with disabilities or mental illnesses (labelled as “useless eaters” and “empty human shells”) fell victim to forced euthanasia, with an average age of forty-five.

Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors reveals that many of the “screeners for the life-and-death selection process” [生死队伍的筛选者] in Nazi concentration camps—those who decided which Jews should be sent directly to the gas chambers and which should be subjected to forced labour—were professional doctors devoted to science. They were also “the key figures behind various cruel human experiments” and “technicians who calibrated the lethal gas”.

They believed that both disabled Germans and Jews were the dregs of humanity, viruses, or bacteria, whose elimination was necessary for the improvement of human life. Framed in terms of national hygiene, this was presented not as discrimination but as science: a matter of state hygiene.

It is therefore hardly surprising that Nazi Minister of Propaganda Goebbels himself was an accomplished medical and biological scholar, or that SS Chief Heinrich Himmler went so far as to proclaim: “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology”. [Note: The passage reflects the regime’s habit of framing politics in biological terms; however, Goebbels was not a medical or biological scholar by training, and the ‘applied biology’ formulation is more commonly attributed to Rudolf Hess (1934) than to Himmler.]

From a biopolitical perspective, Nazi totalitarianism was not only committed to destroying the old world and creating a new one but was particularly obsessed with destroying the old human and creating a new one. As Hannah Arendt observed, the ultimate goal of totalitarian ideology is not to transform the external world or bring about revolutionary social change, but to transform human nature itself.

The “transformation of human beings” [改造人] involves no more than two aspects: the transformation of the body or physical being and the transformation of the mind or spirit. Eliminating old forms of life and creating new ones is undoubtedly a more radical utopian project than creating a new state or a new society.

The practice of ideological remoulding [思想改造] (the so-called “revolution in the depths of the soul” [灵魂深处闹革命]) has a long historical tradition, involving the transformation of people’s worldviews, political beliefs, objects of loyalty and emotional experiences. [Note: “revolution in the depths of the soul” is a Mao-era slogan referring to continuous, intensive ideological remoulding during mass political campaigns, aiming to enforce both ideological and emotional conformity]

Historically, however, such efforts largely remained at the level of language and consciousness, manifesting primarily as indoctrination and propaganda, without penetrating the physical, biological or corporeal level. The means employed were typically limited to carrots (inducement through benefits) and sticks (coercion through violence).

As for the actual effectiveness of this kind of ideological remoulding, I have always harboured doubts, for humans are, after all, creatures capable of lying. Who could truly know whether those who shouted “Heil Hitler” were not, in their hearts, cursing for his early death?

To take another example, during the Cultural Revolution there was an absurd claim that a person who had established a “proletarian worldview” [无产阶级世界观] ought to find cow dung fragrant and roses foul-smelling. If someone said that cow dung smelled bad, this meant that their thinking and worldview had not been properly remoulded and that they had yet to rid themselves of bourgeois tastes.

But if a person verbally declared that “cow dung smells nice”, had they truly been remoulded? Not necessarily. They were quite likely lying. At the physiological level, they still possessed a bourgeois sense of smell: cow dung still smelled foul to them—they simply dared not say so.

The mark of a thoroughly remoulded worldview, then, is not that one recognises at the level of consciousness or reason that cow dung is fragrant, but that one’s nose and sense of smell tell them that cow dung truly is fragrant (and that roses are foul).

For this very reason, ideological remoulding is a long, arduous, and perhaps even impossible process. As the Soviet writer Alexei Tolstoy wrote in the epigraph to The Eighteenth Year, the second novel in The Road to Calvary trilogy, the ideological remoulding of intellectuals requires being “soaked three times in clear water, bathed three times in blood, and boiled three times in lye”. [Note: Tolstoy opens the novel with this folk saying; the application to intellectuals is the author’s interpretation.]

The situation is now different. With advanced technological means at our disposal, all it takes is implanting a chip or injecting a certain substance into a person to fundamentally alter their biological and physiological attributes, including their sense of smell and other perceptions, not to mention their thoughts, beliefs or political stance. In this way, cow dung could be made to smell genuinely fragrant.

This represents the highest stage of ideological remoulding: completely transforming a person’s physiological structure, biological traits and bodily sensations. In other words, it grounds spiritual and intellectual transformation at the biological, physical and physiological level, thereby solidifying its material foundation, for thought without such a foundation has always seemed inherently unstable.

It is thus evident that high-tech methods such as chip implantation truly push ideological remoulding to the level of biopolitics. Foucault once defined the characteristic of biopolitics as the incorporation of human biological traits into political considerations, into the very core of political strategy and political power.

Achieving ideological remoulding through biological methods (a non-ideological approach) constitutes biopolitics in the age of AI and is also an upgraded version of fascism in the AI era.

If one wishes to make a person submit to a particular ideology or doctrine, or submit to the absolute rule of a certain leader with unwavering loyalty, there is no longer a need for indoctrination or violent threats. All that is required is the implantation of a chip so small as to be completely invisible.

III. A Brave New World

In fact, the very situation we face today was already foretold with startling prescience by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel Brave New World.

This famous work of political satire (which is also a dystopian novel and a work of science fiction) depicts a chilling biopolitical landscape in a future world.

Set in the year 2532, the world Huxley portrays is one of highly advanced science and technology, abundant material comfort and a populace free from worries about food and clothing. People live in contentment, their every desire instantly and freely satisfied, and life unfolds amid “sunlit days”.

What is frightening, however, is that everything in this world is regulated, standardised, and homogenised. No one is permitted individual personality, emotion, personal belief or private morality, making genuine human connection non-existent.

There are no families here, nor any sexual relationships based on love. Individuals are not even allowed to choose their own sexual partners, as all partners are assigned at random.

What is particularly noteworthy is that this orderly “brave new world” is engineered through high‑tech means, especially biotechnology.

For example, in Brave New World, babies are entirely conceived in test tubes and cultivated in laboratories, eliminating the need for natural childbirth. From the embryonic incubation stage, individuals are biologically designated into five rigid social classes: Alpha (α), Beta (β), Gamma (γ), Delta (δ) and Epsilon (ε).

These constitute social strata akin to five rigid “castes”, fixed and unalterable.

Alphas and Betas are the highest ranks, trained to become leaders and elites who govern and control the other classes. Gammas form the ordinary tier, equivalent to common citizens. Deltas and Epsilons are the lowest and most degraded, intellectually limited and capable only of performing simple manual labour.

Before developing into embryos, fertilised eggs designated for the lower classes are subjected to large-scale replication through a method known as the “Bokanovsky Process” and only survive after undergoing a series of brutal “competitive” eliminations.

Likewise, scientific methods are used to endow each social class with fixed and immutable habits and preferences. Lower classes are not permitted to have higher-class tastes.

For instance, the novel describes a detail in which Delta and Epsilon infants are subjected to electric shocks when they touch flowers (a metaphor for beauty) so as to destroy their aesthetic capacity, as they are deemed unworthy of such ability.

This is a form of “education” (brainwashing) that combines violence with high technology.

Even more cruelly, the lowest Epsilons are kept in a state of chronic cerebral hypoxia through artificial means, turning them into docile, cognitively impaired labourers who remain content with a lifetime of low‑grade physical work.

Moreover, in Brave New World, people are not only assigned their social rank and behavioural patterns from birth, but administrators also employ so‑called “scientific” methods—such as test-tube cultivation, conditioning, hypnosis, sleep‑teaching and Pavlovian training—to exercise strict control over preferences of each caste. This ensures that they willingly and even joyfully adhere to their predetermined lifestyles, consumption patterns, social roles, occupations and even habitual tastes, forever shielded from any “negative” or “depressive” emotions.

Human emotions can also be controlled through a hallucinogenic drug called “soma”: whenever distress, pain or anxiety is about to arise, swallowing a tablet delivers instant euphoria. Every emotional problem is resolved with “soma”.

In short, in Brave New World, ideological education has moved beyond traditional indoctrination or coercion and has been replaced by biotechnology.

I refer to this startling vision of totalitarian rule as “biopolitics” precisely because governance here—including control over private life, thought, spirit, emotion and taste—is achieved through biological and medical means. This is biopolitics in its truest form: the politicisation of life and the vitalisation of politics.

Ideological education through language or other traditional disciplinary methods used in traditional societies finds no place, or has lost its effectiveness, in this world.

IV. Totalitarianism Empowered by Technology

In his 2024 new book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari introduces the concept of a “totalitarian network”, stating:

“No matter where we live, we might find ourselves cocooned by a web of unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives, reshape our politics and culture, and even reengineer our bodies and minds—while we can no longer comprehend the forces that control us, let alone stop them. If a twenty-first century totalitarian network succeeds in conquering the world, it may be run by nonhuman intelligence, rather than by a human dictator. People who single out China, Russia, or a post-democratic United States as their main source for totalitarian nightmares misunderstand the danger. In fact, Chinese, Russians, Americans, and all other humans are together threatened by the totalitarian potential of nonhuman intelligence.”

In his TED talk “Why Fascism Is So Tempting”, Harari again warns that fascism and dictatorial rule may return.

They will, however, appear in new guises, one that is “more relevant to the new technological realities of the 21st century”, such as digital and life-science technologies, and especially the convergence of the two.

Harari’s warning [in Nexus] rings out with a deafening force [振聋发聩], yet the so-called “[threat of] the totalitarian potential of nonhuman intelligence” ultimately remains a threat from humans, not from technology itself. After all, artificial intelligence and other forms of “nonhuman intelligence” are still human inventions and, to this day, remain under human control.

Therefore, the nightmare of network totalitarianism or digital totalitarianism that Harari describes is not merely technological or digital tyranny, but a convergence of technological and political totalitarianism—a form of totalitarianism empowered by technology. Its control over human beings is comprehensive: from politics to culture, from the body to the mind.

As Harari further notes, data are replacing land and machinery as the most important resource in today’s world, and politics has become a struggle over the control of data flows. Dictatorship today thus entails the concentration of vast quantities of data in the hands of a small number of power groups. Harari warns: “The greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient than democracies”.

The concentration of information, long a principal limitation on authoritarian power, has in the present era ceased to be a constraint and may instead serve as its most formidable asset. In Nexus, Harari writes: “Suppose someone wants to know your political views. Your smartphone monitors which news channels you are watching and notes that you watch on average forty minutes of Fox News and forty seconds of CNN a day”. Algorithms can record precisely my every utterance and action, even every emotional fluctuation and every heartbeat. They understand me better than I understand myself.

Once such algorithms exist, an external power system, such as a government or a large corporation, can not only predict every individual’s decisions, but also manipulate their emotions. A dictator may be unable to provide high-quality public services yet still succeed in making us love him infinitely and hate his opponents infinitely.

“Under-the-skin surveillance might eventually come into its own […] At that point, if biometric sensors register what happens to the heart rate and brain activity of millions of people as they watch a particular news item on their smartphones, that can teach the computer network far more than just our general political affiliation. The network could learn precisely what makes each human angry, fearful or joyful. The network could then both predict and manipulate our feelings, selling us anything it wants—be it a product, a politician or a war.”

If a government (or a corporation) understands me better than I understand myself and can manage all my behaviour and thoughts at the micro level, this amounts to a form of social control refined down to every single cell.

In Harari’s view, in an era where even every individual’s emotions and feelings can be controlled, democracy may struggle to survive. This is because, under such conditions, what liberal democracy’s adversaries are invading is no longer our email or bank accounts, but our emotions. They exploit our fear, hatred and arrogance, and then use these emotions to divide us and destroy democracy from within. This method in fact originated in Silicon Valley, where it was initially developed to sell products.

Now, however, the enemies of democracy use the same methods to sell us fear, hatred and arrogance. They cannot manufacture these emotions out of thin air [凭空制造], so they must first understand our weaknesses, then turn them against us. So what can we do today to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships?

Harari is neither a simple optimist nor an absolute pessimist. He still holds hope for democracy and rejects fatalism [宿命论] and inaction [不作为]: “It is a mistake, however, to imagine that just because computers could enable the creation of a total surveillance regime, such a regime is inevitable. Technology is rarely deterministic.”

In the twenty-first century, rapidly developing digital technology may indeed enable the continuous surveillance of all citizens, but this does not mean that states have no alternative choices. Harari points out that when it comes to such new surveillance technologies, “democracies can choose to use the new powers of surveillance in a limited way, in order to provide citizens with better health care and security without destroying their privacy and autonomy.”

Of course, this is not a task that technology alone can accomplish—it requires forces beyond technology.

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