China | Eyes everywhere

China’s enormous surveillance state is still growing

Its citizens don’t seem to mind

Photograph: Reuters

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.

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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Eyes everywhere”

From the November 25th 2023 edition

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