cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45014536
The Chinese government has blanketed the country with the world’s largest network of surveillance cameras.
Some cameras swivel, ensuring sweeping views of public squares. Others scan license plates of passing cars, allowing police to track vehicles in real-time. At night, cameras light up across China’s cities, shining lights down alleys and corners.
Over the past few decades, the Chinese government has rolled out a series of high-tech surveillance projects aimed at bringing the entire country under watch, including “Sky Net” and the “Golden Shield”.
[…]
The latest such project is called the “Xueliang Project,” or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a quote from Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, who once said “the people have sharp eyes” when urging them to root out neighbors opposed to socialist values.
AP investigations have found that American companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. The U.S. government repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, AP found.
The cameras studding China are knitted together in policing systems that allow authorities to track and control virtually anyone in the country, often targeting perceived threats to the state like dissidents, religious believers or ethnic minorities. Following directives from Beijing to ensure “100 percent coverage” in key public areas, authorities have installed facial-recognition cameras across the country, including in unlikely locations:
Ski slopes.
Beaches.
Remote country roads.
The Great Wall of China.
A slew of cameras greets visitors to Beijing, with a screen underneath announcing: “Amazing China travel starts here!”
At times, entire neighborhoods have been demolished and rebuilt in part to make it easier for cameras to keep watch. The historic quarter of Xinjiang’s ancient silk road city of Kashgar, once a maze-like warren of twisting alleys, was demolished and rebuilt with wider avenues and thousands of camera that light up at night.
China’s cities, roads and villages are now studded with more cameras than the rest of the world combined, analysts say — roughly one for every two people. The goal is clear, according to authorities: Total surveillance in every corner of the country, with “no blind spots” to be found.
The degree of whataboutism is astonishing, once again.
Among the cities with the highest numbers of surveillance cameras per capita, almost all are Chinese. China is a single-party dictatorship that is far ahead in building an Orwellian nightmare. (But tankies will find something on the web that shows that the West isn’t better, I’m sure.)
China was where Google and Microsoft and IBM and Dell and all the other big name companies tested the surveillance networks they’re now deploying in the United States. Or do you think all those data centers are actually being used to ask LLMs about recipes?
Sure, the test environment is technically ahead of the production environment. For now.
How do you differentiate whataboutism from highlighting the antichinese hypocrisy?
Us a surveillance state good? No. Is a commercial surveillance society good? Also no.
Is targeting minorities for dedication good? Not from my perspective.
Is targeting minorities for incarceration keeping said minority poorer? Also not from my perspective.
It’s not whataboutism is that many people forget they are living in a distopian society with out realizing it.
God, go visit the uk. You can’t breathe there without a camera watching
I remember visiting London with some buddies. We bought some cider in some street shop and sat down at nearby bench to drink and chat a bit before going back to the hostel.
Police pulled up less than 5 minutes later to chase us away.
This is true of plenty of western “democracies” as well. Shit, there’s a story of cops using a privately-run camera cluster to track a woman who crossed state lines to obtain an abortion. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-texas-cop-used-83000-cameras-track-her-down
China isn’t some socialist paradise but let’s be honest about how bad our own countries are and not try to depict China as a special case.
From what I understand it’s still worse in China (which IMO is worth noting), but yeah, western countries are continuously expanding their surveillance networks too (and paying extremely sketchy companies to help do it).
Just consider the source for that information. The US is particularly aggressive in propagandizing its citizens.
Yeah. Western democracies are the apprentice, China is the master here.
It’s not just China. The USA is working on it too.
Soon it will comes to other countries like the USA and Germamy
I was in the uk in 2007, the amount of cctv was insane, can’t imagine what’s it like now
I left in 2019, I saw cameras screwed into trees out in the middle of nowhere.
It’s already like that
“soon” as in to late
Very sad times.
Where be the tankies?
I’m sure this is all just western propaganda or some kind of misunderstanding. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation…
