China’s people, as is sometimes said, are “trying to breathe,” hoping to find some freedom from central control. Four female college students in the central city of Zhengzhou tried to breathe in June 2024 as they decided to take an overnight 50-kilometer bike ride to Kaifeng, where they could enjoy a meal of soup dumplings. The craze caught on, and by November 100,000 young people were making the overnight treks. Were the bike rides innocent activity? Of course they were, but authorities were deeply concerned nonetheless and left nothing to chance. They tried to limit the number of riders, and there were even reports that colleges and universities were restricting students from congregating and participating. For an insecure regime, just about everything is considered a threat. (Illlustration by Dean MacAdam for the Washington Examiner) Chinese society has always been volatile, but it is even more so now. President Xi Jinping’s response to widespread unhappiness is to increase coercion. The Chinese Communist Party has developed and now operates the world’s most sophisticated system of social controls, employing, among other things, neighborhood “grid management” monitors, an updated version of local “watchers” from the Maoist era; more than 700 million surveillance cameras; the Great Firewall cutting the country off from the global internet; and a standardized social credit system. The control and surveillance mechanisms, in their totality, are especially merciless. For instance, those with low social credit scores...