Kai Strittmatter

columnist, journalist, and sinologist

Kai Strittmatter is a German columnist, journalist, and sinologist, regarded as Europe’s leading expert on contemporary China. He studied sinology in Munich, Xi’an, and Taipei, and he worked as a foreign correspondent in China and Turkey for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung for more than two decades. His best-known book is We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State (2018), in which he analyses how the Chinese regime under Xi Jinping is building a digital totalitarianism using artificial intelligence, big data, and the social credit system. He also wrote China’s New Power (Chinas neue Macht, 2020), the travel guide China A to Z (2006), and A User’s Guide to Istanbul (Gebrauchsanweisung für Istanbul, 2010). He has received numerous awards for his investigative journalism, including the prestigious Theodor-Wolff-Preis for his report Wolf Child (Wolfskind, 2014), about Chinese children who denounced their parents as enemies of the state.