The following report is from OneZero:
One of China’s largest and most pervasive surveillance networks got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai.
In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing tens of thousands of security cameras across urban and rural areas — more than 28,500 in total by 2016. Even the smallest villages had at least six security cameras installed, according to state media.
Those cameras weren’t just monitored by police and automated facial recognition algorithms. Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything amiss. The security footage could also be viewed on smartphones.
In 2015 the Chinese government announced that a similar program would be rolled out across China, with a particular focus on remote and rural towns. It was called the “Xueliang Project,” or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a quote from communist China’s former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong who once wrote that “the people have sharp eyes” when looking out for neighbors not living up to communist values.
Sharp Eyes is one of a number of overlapping and intersecting technological surveillance projects built by the Chinese government over the last two decades. Projects like the Golden Shield Project, Safe Cities, SkyNet, Smart Cities, and now Sharp Eyes mean that there are more than 200 million public and private security cameras installed across China.
Every five years, the Chinese government releases a plan outlining what it looks to achieve in the next half-decade. China’s 2016 five-year plan set a goal for Sharp Eyes to achieve 100% coverage of China’s public spaces in 2020. Though publicly available reports don’t indicate whether the program has hit that goal — they suggest that the country has gotten very close.
China’s modern surveillance scheme started in 2003, according to Dahlia Peterson, research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, with the creation of the Golden Shield Project.
The Golden Shield Project, run by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), is, in part, responsible for the country’s strict internet censorship. But the program also included physical surveillance. The MPS created databases that included 96% of China’s citizens, with one titled the National Basic Population Information Database. That database includes household registration information, called “hukou,” as well as information on past travels and criminal history, according to a report from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
Local population databases were also created, according to a paper published in the American Journal of Political Science. These local databases allowed for blacklists, which barred the use of public transportation. Police would be dispatched if someone who had been blacklisted tried to book a bus, train, or airline ticket.
Following Golden Shield, China launched two other surveillance projects focused on the installation of cameras. Safe Cities, launched in 2003, focused on disaster warnings, traffic management, and public security. SkyNet focused on installing cameras connected to facial recognition algorithms.
Chinese state-run media has claimed Skynet can scan the entire Chinese population in one second with 99.8 percent accuracy, yet such claims ignore glaring technical limitations.
Dahlia Peterson
Observers should take these figures with a grain of salt: Accurate and up-to-date information about China’s surveillance initiatives isn’t easily available, and what is publicly known is mainly generated by academics and journalists with some access to government officials or surveillance equipment manufacturers. It’s also unclear which cameras are exclusively viewed by village, city, and provincial governments, and which feed data back to the central government.
Just like Golden Shield, the SkyNet program still exists today, and benefits from 16 years of A.I. research, as well as the tech industry’s boom. According to the New York Times, SkyNet data is used at building complexes that use facial recognition to open security gates. The photos from those security gates are then shared with local police to build a database of the local population.
However, these surveillance schemes are mostly targeted at cities, where funding and population density makes centralized surveillance easier. Sharp Eyes, which is focused on rural areas, is meant to offload work from potentially understaffed police departments.
For instance, an article written by Chinese state media about the Sharp Eyes implementation in Pingyi notes that the county has a population of 1 million people, and only about 300 police officers.
What gets reported to police by the Sharp Eyes program isn’t just limited to crime. One Pingyi resident in the state media article spoke of reporting a collapsed manhole cover, while another mentioned that they had suspected a multilevel marketing scheme happening in a nearby building. The MLM organization was reported to the police, who allegedly broke it up with warnings and fines.
According to Peterson, the Sharp Eyes project is implemented differently depending on each city or town’s needs, but the general premise is the same: The city or town is divided into a grid, and each square of the grid acts as its own administrative unit. Citizens watch security footage from within their grid, giving a sense of ownership over their immediate surroundings. Municipal data can then be aggregated based on reports from each square on the grid.
Cities can also add new technology to the mix at their discretion. Though the system primarily relies on facial recognition and locally broadcast CCTV, the city of Harbin, for instance, published a notice that it was looking for predictive policing technology to sweep a person’s bank transaction data, location history, and social connections, as well as make a determination as to whether they were a terrorist or violent.
Much of the funding for these various surveillance schemes comes from the central government, but regional municipalities and cities also foot the bill for local networks of cameras. At times, counties’ surveillance spending far outstrips other municipal services. An analysis of more than 76,000 government procurement notices by ChinaFile showed that surveillance spending has become a significant portion of many cities’ budgets. In 2018, contracts from the city of Zhoukou showed that officials spent as much on surveillance as they did on education, and spent more than twice as much money on surveillance as on environmental protection programs.
In some instances, Chinese citizens even crowdfund these surveillance measures. In the Shandong province, residents of the small city of Linyi raised an additional 13 million yuan, or $2 million, to help support the full coverage of video surveillance cameras.
This countrywide demand for surveillance technology has created a gold rush for companies developing and selling surveillance technology. Many of the companies selling camera hardware and video management software, especially for locally streamed Sharp Eyes footage, aren’t well known outside of China.
In a list translated by CSET’s Peterson, some of the top companies supplying this technology are surveillance camera manufacturers VisionVera and UniView, as well as big data company Neusoft. On its website, Neusoft specifically calls out that it manages a database on a population of 1.3 billion, and integrates data from more than 20 government sectors, as well as analyzes tens of millions of social videos.
Internationally known Chinese companies like Sensetime, Megvii, Hikvision, and Dahua are far more prevalent in conversations about the persecution of ethnic minorities. These companies have all been sanctioned by the U.S. government based on their involvement with the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has been accused of committing genocide against the country’s Uighur ethnic minority. Reports from Xinjiang’s internment camps are horrific, with documented cases of rape, sterilization, or forced labor.
The facial recognition system pitched to Xinjiang’s Shawan region to detect religious minorities was developed by Megvii, which denies involvement in the program. However, ChinaFile found contracts and state media reports that suggest large parts [sic]… (the sentence appears to be missing the final clause).
A recent report from the LA Times and surveillance industry watchdog IPVM also showed that Dahua had also developed facial recognition to specifically detect Uighurs, a Chinese ethnic minority widely persecuted in China’s Xinjiang province. A separate report from IPVM showed how Huawei and Megvii cooperated in the development of a Uighur detection system in 2018.
China’s next five-year plan, which covers 2021 to 2025, places specific emphasis on giving social governance to local municipalities via the grid system, as well as building out even more security projects, to “strengthen construction of the prevention and control system for public security.”
This means the future of China’s surveillance apparatus likely looks a lot like Sharp Eyes: More power and social control given to local governments, so neighbors watch neighbors.
The government also emphasized the persecution of those it maintains as hostile and separatists.
We will also closely guard against, and crack down on, the infiltration, sabotage, subversion and separatist activities of hostile forces.
The plan says
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
[29] The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. [30] And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none. [31] Therefore have I poured out mine indignation upon them; I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath: their own way have I recompensed upon their heads, saith the Lord GOD.Ezekiel 22:29-31
In a nation that is practically devoid of any mention of Jesus Christ, this is what happens. As we have been reporting, Covid has been the catalyst to usher in hoards of spy gadgetry to track and trace all of over movements and actions. Now China plans to be always watching. Needless to say, China is a slave nation, and that is putting super lightly.
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We had a young man who grew up in China candidate for missionary service several years back. His father had been deported, the little church scattered and left in the care of a peasant believer who was overwhelmed by it all, but resolved as the least surveilled and suspect. I spoke to him of the Three Self Patriotic Movement & his reaction & recoil was instant. It saddened me because it was the best & most faithful church we’d ever been members of, but I was seeing the signs & realizing that America had its own version of the Three Self Patriotic Movement here.
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Google & Big Tech, the corporate powers & Rome, using the U.N. ….actually armed & enabled China by transferring jobs & industry, intellectual know-how….in nano-biotechnology & cyber surveillance, as well as many other fields of endeavor, propaganda & control. I suspect we shall see the Psalm 83 and Ezekiel 38 war coming of these things, and I pray continually that we will be given mercy, protections and guidance through these things as American freedom continues to be dismantled & set aside, out of the way of the ‘dream’ of the corporate powers which Rome & her spirit head at the highest & deepest levels.
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They’ve come a long way from when Edward Hunter wrote his ‘Brainwashing and the Men Who Survived It’. At the time I didn’t realize he was a Mormon, just that he held back with that curious Judeo-Christian thing. Rome was playing all of the cults, including the Sadduccee humanists, like a song! Just a little misdirection with the truth. Just enough. The Foundations serving that end, too. More recently there was CFR Rick Warren, and Peter Drucker and those ‘Christian’ men who were talking dialectic and the ‘solution’ being to merge into Communitarianism. Super crony corporatism under a global umbrella. They tried to present it as being non-Romish, but if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck….
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We’re back under the Romish European order and its cronies. Theodore Roosevelt hindered it somewhat, busting up the monopolies, and McKinley tried, even as a liberal pandering to the Irish-Catholics for ‘tolerance’, but they assassinated him.
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Colonel House & Wilson achieved what has proven the death blow to our Constitution, and it was just incremental from there. Everything that is permitted a public voice as being a ‘Christian’ voice is either some form of cult: Roman Catholic and cosmic humanist, mystical & ecumenical……or a straw man ‘fundamentalist’. Homeland Security began the trend, but now the voices are mounting painting Bible believers as ‘potential terrorists’ and ‘dangerous’….like our Lord Jesus Christ seemed to them, and most of the ‘good religious people’ are going right along with it.
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A trend catching on right new is ‘Progressive Christianity’ as they call it: formerly baptist churches gone ‘community’ or ‘point’ (new point, cross point, grace pointe) in their transformation is to proclaim that the Bible is not the Word of God, and then to present an experiential Jesus who is the Word, as defined by the religious authorities & hierarchies which we all know ape and join themselves to Rome. The move to reject the Pauline epistles is also picking up steam as the ‘we’re spiritual but not doctrinal’ movement ‘evolves’. Evangelizing is getting responses about Paul being devil possessed or a Luciferian…bizarre stuff, but logical once you understand the root rebellion & reaction against Pauline doctrine that it grows out of. 2 Peter 3 KJB.
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Last week, some of the federal banking accounts experienced a cyber attack that had them down for three hours. Late in the week some Visa connected networks did, too. China is suspect one with good reason, but we must not forget what & who enabled China to that end.
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Anecdotally, with regard to cyber attack on our financial infrastructure (no doubt planned to herd folks toward the Great Reset, ID2020 stuff) my husband was contacted by the payroll department at work yesterday because they had notification someone had applied for unemployment benefits with his name and federal id number. They’d done the same with another employee, and the unemployment office told the payroll clerk that they were having people come in to apply legitimately for benefits, at which time it was being discovered that someone had already applied in those folks’ names & received checks in their names, too. Just a heads up to people out there.
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Still, some are questioning outside of those groups, and we still don’t know when & if total collapse will hit. If 2020 did anything: it shook people up and woke some of them up to realize that things were not as they’d assumed or been taught. We still have a window of opportunity for evangelism, and it is not that night when no man can work. Some time to brace & prepare as far as we can to provide for our families & others less able.
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God bless you for what you are doing. You are filling that void & meeting that need for those convicted & shaken. May God bless it with a harvest, and reprieve to that end.