This year, H&M disappeared from China’s internet. Ride hailing, e-commerce, online promotions: The world’s largest fashion retailer simply vanished without a trace. Its stores were still open for business—if you could find them. They suffered no broken windows or tax raids, but China’s own Baidu Maps and even Apple Maps literally wiped them, well, off the map.
That might seem like a small price to pay for taking a principled stand against modern slavery. But the precision of China’s strike on H&M is just as shocking as its smothering completeness. It demonstrates that the government exercises a form of power in China that is as fine-tuned as it is total. Whether it’s lashing out at a corporate critic, silencing all warnings of an emerging infectious disease, or suppressing the language and religion of an entire ethnic group, China’s government is no brute-force authoritarian regime. It is the inventor of a new 21st century techno-totalitarianism. It possesses all the tools of classic totalitarianism—and many new ones of its own invention.
