China is incorporating facial recognition and other personal data in its surveillance technology, according to academics and reports.
London-based IHS Markit has estimated that China has installed 170 million surveillance cameras and plans to install another 450 million by 2020.
Earlier this month, BBC reporter John Sudworth was tracked down by local police within seven minutes during a test of China’s surveillance system in China’s Guizhou Province.
As camera resolutions increase and information systems acquire increasingly powerful computing and storage capabilities, facial recognition systems have become able to directly detect age, sex and clothing, National Taiwanese University electrical engineering professor Lin Tsung-nan (林宗男) said.
Incorporating data from national identification cards, passports and “Taiwan compatriot travel documents” (台胞證) — permits issued to Taiwanese by Chinese authorities for travel to China — is very simple, Lin said.
Screens at surveillance centers display pedestrians’ names, nationalities, residential addresses and other basic information, Lin said, adding that the technology behind facial recognition is not complex, and Taiwan, Europe and the US should all be able to obtain it.
However, democratic nations would not randomly identify people on the streets, because they value privacy, human rights and legitimacy, Lin said.
China is a totalitarian state and does not need to consider these problems, Lin said, adding that social monitoring is the norm in the country and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese government have invested a lot of resources in the development of related industries so they can strictly monitor the public.
After assuming office, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) felt internal and external forces converging on the Chinese regime and trying to overthrow it, so he decided to more strictly monitor society, said Chien Hsin University of Science and Technology professor Yan Jiann-fa (顏建發), who was formerly director of the Democratic Progressive Party’s China Affairs Department.
On the legal front, Xi issued the National Security Law, Cybersecurity Law, Law on the Administration of Activities of Overseas Nongovernmental Organizations in the Mainland of China and other regulations, Yan said.
Simultaneously, Xi ordered the enhancement of monitoring technology and strengthened the government’s control, he added.
Apart from facial recognition, the Chinese government has over the past few years also developed speech recognition technology, Human Rights Watch said in a report in October.
In China’s Anhui Province, which is the designated pilot site, the Chinese government collected 70,000 sound samples, the report said.
An estimated 900,000 to 1.5 million Taiwanese, including businesspeople, students and dependents, live in China. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office on Nov. 8 reiterated three kinds of preferential treatment for Taiwanese studying in China.
In October, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Katharine Chang (張小月) said that Beijing would continue to try to attract younger Taiwanese with occupational, educational and other preferential treatments.
“Taiwanese should not be naive about going to China for personal development,” Yan said. “Do not maintain illusions about China and do not expect your privacy to be respected.”
Additional reporting by Chen Wei-han
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