The Chinese Communist Party has escalated its surveillance of the public, from the “Golden Shield Project” launched in 2003 to the “Sharp Eye Project,” which is planned to cover the whole country, and from official surveillance to encouraging mutual reporting, making the public increasingly disgusted. At the same Time, the CCP’s use of surveillance systems to violate human rights and consume large amounts of taxpayers’ money has also been gradually revealed.
According to a March 2 article on the OneZero website, the CCP’s surveillance plan to cover 100 percent of the country’s public places by 2020 is known as the Sharp Eyes project, which uses facial recognition technology and focuses more on allowing The Sharp Eyes project uses facial recognition technology and focuses more on letting people spy on each other.
Chinese Communist Party’s Surveillance Upgrade to Let People Spy on Each Other
According to the article, the Sharp Eyes system, which covers the whole country, is the CCP’s “five-year plan” for 2016, and is a system for neighbors to spy on each other and report on each other. The “Sharp Eye” system uses surveillance cameras, face recognition technology, and special TV boxes installed in residents’ homes to allow people to see surveillance footage on their TVs and smartphones and report it to the police with a button.
The CCP’s next “Five-Year Plan” (2021-2025) is said to emphasize handing over social management to local governments and strengthening the establishment of “prevention and control systems. This means that in the future, the CCP’s surveillance equipment will be more similar to a “sharp eye” system.
The Communist Party has been building a surveillance network for 20 years, violating human rights and hurting people’s money.
According to the article, the “Sharp Eye” project is just one of the many surveillance projects the CCP has undertaken over the past 20 years, along with the Golden Shield Project, Safe City, and SkyNet, which have installed more than 200 million cameras in public and private places on the mainland.
The CCP’s modern surveillance program began in 2003 with the Golden Shield Project, operated by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), and includes strict network censorship and physical surveillance.
The CCP’s Ministry of Public Security has created a database that includes household registration information for 96 percent of the mainland’s population, as well as travel and criminal records. Each local government also has a local database, a blacklist of people who are banned from using public transportation. If someone books a bus, train or plane ticket, the CCP police will be deployed.
Two other surveillance programs launched by the CCP, Safe Cities and SkyNet, are systems that install surveillance cameras and perform face recognition.
Spending on the CCP’s surveillance programs is huge, and an analysis of 76,000 government procurement announcements shows that surveillance spending has become a significant part of many cities’ budgets. Zhoukou City, for example, spent as much on surveillance as it did on Education and more than twice as much as it did on environmental protection in 2018.
The Communist Party’s massive surveillance program has spawned many related businesses that sell cameras and video management software, among other things.
On March 9, mainland media reported that a mainland company, Core Next Technology, won first place in the U.S. NIST-FRVT face recognition test for masks. However, the feedback from the mainland public was particularly concerning: “This kind of first place is not something to be proud of.” “There can’t really be people pretending they don’t know what this is for.”
Companies such as Shangtang Technology (Sensetime), Kuangwei Technology (Megvii), Hikvision and Dahua are on the U.S. sanctions list for aiding the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Uyghur and other minorities.
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