Where Every Tree Hides ‘an Enemy’: How I Watched China’s Paranoia Grow
Returning to China after decades away, a correspondent finds bullet trains, dazzling skylines — and a surveillance state more paranoid and pervasive than ever.
By Andrew Higgins
Then I received a message on WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, from an old friend in Beijing, a lawyer whose earnest decency and movie star looks always reminded me of the “good party cadre” characters in propaganda films. I had not seen him for more than 30 years and was planning to visit the following day. Sadly, his message said, he would not be able to keep our appointment because state security officers, somehow apprised of our plans, had turned up at his door and ordered him to cancel.
China suddenly appeared not so much amazing as alarming...
“Every bush and tree seems like an enemy soldier,” he warned, using a Chinese idiom to describe the paranoia of a security apparatus that has also changed dramatically. It has grown bigger, more intrusive and, thanks to high-tech marvels like WeChat and omnipresent surveillance cameras, much more capable of monitoring just about everyone.
China’s economic transformation over the last four decades has been extraordinary, and it infuriates Chinese officials that Western media outlets display what they see as “anti-China bias.” That is shorthand for reporting that dwells on anxiety about the economy, still growing but at a slower pace, and anything else that deviates from China’s undeniable achievements and charms...
An official sign nearby, however, clouded the carefree mood: “Opposing Traitors and Guarding Against Spies Starts With Us,” it warned, with a phone number to “report espionage activity.”
The hunt for spies has escalated sharply since Xi Jinping took power in 2012 and began throttling the flow of information in and out of China, building up the Great Firewall to prevent Chinese from viewing many foreign websites. There are seemingly no limits on what the state can see and hear, and ordinary Chinese have adapted accordingly — most noticeably with regard to the leader himself...
Mr. Xi is everywhere, on television, on billboards and on the front pages of newspapers and websites. But, throughout my stay in China, not one of the hundreds of Chinese I spoke to, mostly in private, ever uttered his name out loud. Even foreigners often avoided it, pointing at the ceiling when they wanted to refer to China’s president.
The Chinese people whom I met on my travels invariably skirted politics, except when I encountered a zealous patriot during a visit to Dazhai, a former Maoist model commune in a remote mountain area of Shanxi. “Which is better, China or America? Tell the truth!” he shouted, in between praise of China’s leadership and ridicule of the United States and Europe.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/11/world/asia/china-essay-higgins-surveillance.html
https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2026/10/12/where-every-tree-hides-an-enemy/
https://dnyuz.com/2026/10/11/where-every-tree-hides-an-enemy-how-i-watched-chinas-paranoia-grow/