China, which tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. Calling it a Mao-era policing on steroids, a New York Times report May 31 says that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian states and weak democracies across the world.
Thanks to the effectiveness of its surveillance measures, China casts itself as a model of policing, pointing to its low rate of violent crime. But the same apparatus that keeps citizens safe is also routinely used to crush dissent.
Movement is monitored by a network of surveillance cameras, many equipped with AI software that recognises faces and the way a person walks.
