Mass surveillance in China

Mass surveillance has significantly expanded under the PRC Cybersecurity Law (2016) and with the help of local companies like Tencent, Dahua Technology, Hikvision, SenseTime, ByteDance, Megvii, Yitu Technology, Huawei and ZTE, among many others. As of 2019, it is estimated that 200 million monitoring CCTV cameras of the "Skynet" system have been put to use in mainland China, four times the number of surveillance cameras in the United States. As of August 2023, the country had over 700 million surveillance cameras according to online data, one lens for every two citizens. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the implementation of mass surveillance as it has provided a plausible pretext to do so.

Mass surveillance in China emerged in the Maoist era after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Mao invented this mechanism of control that encompassed the entire nation and its people in order to strengthen his power in the newly founded government and detect potential threats to the legitimacy of the CCP and its policies. In the early years, when technology was relatively undeveloped in China, mass surveillance was accomplished through disseminating information by word of mouth. Chinese people kept a watchful eye on one another and reported inappropriate behaviors that infringed upon the dominant social ideals of the time. In the 21st century, mass surveillance has become of part of the CCP's goal of "stability maintenance" in order to detect and prevent protest and dissent in the country.

In 2005, the Chinese government created a mass surveillance system called Skynet. The government revealed Skynet's existence in 2013, by which time the network included over 20 million cameras. In addition to monitoring the general public, cameras were installed outside mosques in the Xinjiang region, temples in Tibet, and the homes of dissidents. Feminists and LGBT rights groups are subject to increased scrutiny.

In 2017, the Chinese government encouraged the use of various mobile phone apps as part of a broader surveillance push. Local regulators launched mobile apps for national security purposes and to allow citizens to report violations.

As of 2018, the most notable surveillance mechanisms were mass camera surveillance on the streets, Internet surveillance, and newly invented surveillance methods based on social credit and identity.

As of 2018, the Chinese central government had also adopted facial recognition technology, surveillance drones, robot police, and big data collection targeting online social media platforms to monitor its citizens.

In 2019, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said China's mass surveillance mechanisms and machinery of private communications was "utterly mind-boggling". As of 2019, it was estimated that 200 million monitoring CCTV cameras of the "Skynet" system had been put to use in mainland China, four times as many as the surveillance cameras in the United States. …

The Chinese government has been strengthening its tight control over the Internet and digital communication. There are more than 750 million Internet users in China, and their online actions are strictly regulated. In 2017, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a new regulation, which imposed restrictions on the production and distribution of online news. The regulation required all platforms, such as online blogs, forums, websites, and social media apps, to be managed by party-sanctioned editorial staff. These staff must obtain approval from the national or local government Internet and information offices and be trained by the central government. As required by the Chinese government, major Internet platforms and messaging services in China established elaborate self-censorship mechanisms. Some have hired teams of thousands to police content and invested in powerful artificial intelligence algorithms. In 2019, on the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, China's AI censors cranked up.

Launched in 2011, WeChat, China's most popular messaging app, is under surveillance by Internet police. Any message sent through a WeChat group is monitored by the Chinese technology giant Tencent, the application's operator. All conversations are stored for six months. Even conversations deleted by WeChat users can be retrieved back by Tencent, especially when government authorities seek evidence of a suspect's illegal activities. Authorities have admitted that they can retrieve archived messages once sent on WeChat. Nevertheless, Tencent CEO Ma Huateng stated that his company will not use user chats for big data analysis or invade users' privacy.

In 2017, the Chinese government required all users of Sina Weibo, a microblogging site, to register with their real names and identity numbers by September 15 of that year. Weibo users who refused to register their accounts with real names were not able to post, repost, or comment on the site.

At the beginning of 2018, Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent, claimed that WeChat's monthly active users across the globe reached a billion for the first time. Since Tencent cooperates with the central government to implement self-censorship and mass surveillance, it enjoys the dominance of its industry in China. …

The social credit system (Chinese: 社会信用体系; pinyin: shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì) is a national credit rating and blacklist implemented by the government of the People's Republic of China. The social credit system is a broad governance strategy to track businesses, individuals, and government institutions and enhance their perceived trustworthiness rather than a single system. It is based on varying degrees of whitelisting (termed "redlisting" in China) and blacklisting. There have been widespread misconceptions in media reports about a unified social credit "score" based on individuals' behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low or rewards if the score is high.

Smart cities began rolling out in 2003 and China is host to hundreds of smart city pilot programs aiming to measure, track and analyse data from every aspect of city life including air quality, traffic flow, congestion and waste water disposal. A key component of smart cities includes the installation of public security cameras in order to more effectively deter crime and anti-social behaviour, however, critics have stated the projects are also used as a form of social control in order to target dissidents and crack down on any potential unrest.

Skynet is an interlinked system of facial recognition software enabled surveillance cameras currently in operation in 16 Chinese provinces used to help public security organs crack down on crime and identify citizens in public through cross reference with criminal and national identity databases held by the Ministry of Public Security and the National Citizen Identity Information Center (NCIIC). According to CCP-owned tabloid Global Times, the system is fast enough to scan the entire population of the People's Republic of China in under a second and allegedly has an accuracy rate of 99.8%.

In 2020, reporting by Human Rights Watch indicated that public security bureaus (PSB's) across the country began implementing "Police Cloud" systems in order to aggregate data from healthcare, social media activity and Internet browsing activity, reportedly to track and predict the activities of activists, dissidents, and ethnic minorities, including those alleged to be in possession of "extreme thoughts". …

In mainland China, one of the most important ongoing projects is a Skynet project with an installation of more than 200 million video surveillance cameras. The real-time pedestrian tracking and recognition system can precisely identify people's clothing, gender, and age, as well as both motor and non-motor vehicles. Additionally, the surveillance system can instantly match a person's image with their personal identification and information. Golden Shield is a giant mechanism of censorship and surveillance that blocks tens of thousands of websites that may present negative reports about the CCP's narrative and control.

The Chinese government sent groups of cadres to Tibetan villages as part of the Benefit the Masses campaign in 2012. The purpose of the campaign was to improve service and living quality in Tibet and to educate the locals about the importance of social stability and adherence to the CCP. The local people were also supervised in order to prevent uprisings from taking place.

In Tibet, users of mobile phones and the Internet must identify themselves by name. The government reported that the program had reached full realization in June 2013. An official said that "the real-name registration is conducive to protecting citizens' personal information and curbing the spread of detrimental information".

In 2018, during the Saga Dawa, the holy fourth month for Tibetan Buddhists, the government enforced stricter rules in Lhasa, according to the Global Times. People were also discouraged from engaging in religious practices in this month. When they did, they were supervised closely.

As a method of protesting, some Tibetans have engaged in immolation, which is a tradition of protest against Chinese control that was first practiced in the mid-20th century.

In Xinjiang and especially its capital city, Ürümqi, there are security checkpoints and identification stations almost everywhere. The Uyghurs are among those that fall under the "focus personnel" category and is subjected to intense surveillance. People need to show their ID cards and have their faces scanned by cameras at a security station before entering a supermarket, a hotel, a train station, a highway station, or other public place. The ratio of police officers stationed in Xinjiang to the Xinjiang population is higher than elsewhere. …