The project A Hundred Million Lives on File? – Confidential Records and Social Control in Mao Zedong’s China sets out to analyze and describe China's “dossier dictatorship” of the 1950s and 60s - the system whereby communist party officials exercised social control through confidential records on ordinary citizens’ actions and utterances, private and public. The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) [2004 – 2006] and is an in-depth study of a wealth of new primary sources. It advances the view that neither was the system a unique mechanism for the “management of a revolutionary society” as has been claimed by some, nor was it simply an impersonal institution of “administration,” as suggested by others. The system’s many culturally grounded aspects notwithstanding, the content of the confidential records themselves make it clear that there were far greater essential similarities between the Chinese system and, for example, those of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany than has hitherto been assumed. The results of the project will be of interest not just to historians of the Cold War and of state and society in the early People’s Republic, but also to social scientists seeking a firmer empirical grasp of the roots of a system that has survived in modified form and still affects the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens.