The sleepy county of Kaijiang, on the eastern fringes of Sichuan province, is hardly a hotbed of unrest. The authorities there seem intent on keeping it that way. They are hoping to upgrade the county’s portion of China’s “Skynet” surveillance system. According to a procurement notice from August, officials in Kaijiang want cameras that “support detection of more than 60 faces simultaneously”. The local system should be fast enough to analyse up to 100 faces per second and have the capacity to store up to 1.8bn images (Kaijiang has a population of 410,000). There must be “no blind spots”, says the document.
Officials argue that such measures protect the public. China’s abundance of cctv cameras, many equipped with facial-recognition technology, “leave criminals with nowhere to hide”, boasts the People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece. Chinese people report feeling safe from violent crime, so there is merit to these claims. But the cameras also protect the party. Dissidents and demonstrators can be tracked as easily as burglars. Step out of line and the government will probably know.
