In China, Big Brother is watching you even as you sort your trash

The Chinese state is taking surveillance to the next level. Vast networks of cameras are not just aimed at reducing crime but also enforcing recycling laws, encouraging civic behaviour. Privacy concerns aside, the tools are reshaping the relationship between government and citizen

Celine Sui

Published: 11:00am, 5 Aug 2019

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In Jiuting town in Shanghai in June, the urban management squadron was on a case in which a van load of insulation foam was secretly dumped at a construction waste disposal site at night. Because of omnipresent video cameras, it didn’t take long for officials to track down the van and fine the offender 20,000 yuan (US$2,900). Although the hefty fine and the determined enforcement of recycling laws shocked many netizens, they were part and parcel of a new waste-sorting regimen in Shanghai that has been dubbed “the most stringent in history”.

The implementation of the new policy also illustrates how hi-tech surveillance has emboldened the Chinese state to spearhead more ambitious initiatives, targeting not only economic matters but also the most mundane activities in the lives of ordinary people.

Peaceful City is a security management platform that connects cameras across cities and controls all aspects of public security, including policing, emergency management, traffic management and access control. Connected to this platform is a mass surveillance system called Skynet, a network of video cameras exchanging real-time information with government databases.

There were 200 million of these cameras in 2018, and with 400 million more to be installed by 2020, China will soon have almost one camera for every two citizens. Beijing’s aim, writes Stephen Chen in the Post, is to “identify anyone, anytime, anywhere in China within three seconds”.

Thanks to more demand from the state and to the country’s transition to the age of big data and artificial intelligence, the Chinese video surveillance industry is growing fast. This market grew 14.7 per cent in 2017, accounting for 44 per cent of global revenue.

Hikvision, based in Hangzhou and 42 per cent owned by the state, is one of the world’s largest purveyors of video surveillance hardware and has supplied equipment to hundreds of the government’s surveillance projects in major cities. SenseNets, a Shenzhen firm revealed to be tracking 2.5 million people in Xinjiang, provides facial recognition technology, crowd analysis technology and human verification technology to the state’s Skynet programme.

SenseNets was co-founded by SenseTime, China’s largest algorithm provider and the world’s most highly valued AI start-up. According to an article on the popular Chinese website Sohu, if you have ever used a Chinese smartphone or walked down a street in a Chinese city, your face has probably been captured in SenseTime’s database.

Revealed: the advanced ‘black tech’ within reach of China’s police

The Chinese state legitimises its comprehensive surveillance system for the purpose of maintaining public safety. Because the system constantly scans faces and alerts the authorities to any suspects it detects, the more prevalent the cameras, the harder it gets for people to commit crimes.

These cameras helped the Shanghai police arrest 6,000 suspects in 2017. In Wuhan, burglary cases declined by 39 per cent in 2014, after the city launched the second phase of Skynet. In Guizhou, a BBC reporter who did a test run of the facial recognition surveillance system was stopped by uniformed men in seven minutes. Currently, the police solve a remarkable 90 per cent of crimes in China through the surveillance network.

Camera use is also integral to the Communist Party’s bid to improve civic behaviour and discourage spitting, littering and other bad habits. For instance, the Shenzhen start-up Intellifusion uses high-definition cameras and artificial cameras to help the police name and shame jaywalkers by showing their photos on nearby LED screens and on the internet.

But Shanghai’s waste sorting system adds yet another level to surveillance in China. In 2018, the city rolled out smart recycling bins – receptacles which come complete with video cameras and scanners, and which are able to distinguish between categories of garbage and collect waste disposal data.

To use these bins, residents swipe smart cards. Those who sort their waste regularly earn cashable points, and those who do not might receive a visit from the neighbourhood committee.

The next stage – transferring garbage from bin to treatment centre – also involves high-definition cameras and AI tools. In March, Shanghai launched an information platform that tracks the entire process of waste disposal. Cameras are installed on garbage trucks and in transfer stations, where 2,000 to 3,000 photos of the trash are taken, then analysed using AI to detect garbage that has been misclassified – for example, a plastic bottle that has been chuck in with wet waste.

“We know which truck entered which district when and collected how much garbage,” Zhang Zhigang, an executive of the system developer, told Xinhua.

A global reckoning on waste is under way, thanks to China

Setting up a data gathering system for waste sorting is not only significant for catching recalcitrant recyclers or implementing recycling laws. It is also a prime example of how integrated and multifaceted China’s data system will eventually become.

By collecting detailed data about waste disposal habits on a large scale, the state is able to understand its citizens and the ins and outs of their lives from yet another angle – how much meat they eat, what they consume, whether there is evidence of criminal behaviour, a contagious disease and so on. This hi-tech reality not only shapes how the Chinese state governs its people, but also opens the door to a new way of 21st century governance.

Past reports on the Chinese surveillance system have tended to focus, understandably, on moral questions of privacy – and in effect skip over what the technology is actually doing on the ground. Monitoring the public is a task with increasingly high-order responsibilities.

China’s interlocking system of surveillance cameras, as it infiltrates governmental initiatives, shows just how technology is reshaping the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. It brings new expectations for what is possible, but also what is expected in the management of a vast country with a huge population.

Celine Sui is a US-based independent scholar and freelance journalist focused on Sino-African relations

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