Shenzhen, China - It's nightfall in China's most watched
city. Women nervously draw tight their curtains, fearful that the
cameras that record their daily trips to the office and shops will
pry into their homes and secretly film their most intimate moments.
It is no empty fear. Shenzhen, a frenetic city of 12 million on
the border with Hong Kong, is at the heart of an experiment by the
national government to monitor its vast population with the latest
closed-circuit television, or CCTV, technology - and the boundaries
of the experiment are being questioned.
More than 200,000 hi-tech cameras disguised as lighting columns
have been set up at main streets, shopping plazas, parks and highways
in Shenzhen, beaming live video to monitors in what was expected to
become the world's most extensive use of technology for social
control.
From the moment you walk over the land border from Hong Kong into
the bustling city that just 20 years ago was a sleepy fishing
village, high-tech cameras with a 360-degree scope follow you.
Within two years, Shenzhen was expected to have video feeding into
a central database from as many as 2 million surveillance cameras -
the highest concentration on the planet and four times more than
London.
The experiment is part of a nationwide project called Golden
Shield, designed to tighten social controls with the use of video
technology, much of it imported from major Western companies as
security for this month's Beijing Olympic Games.
In Shenzhen, according to deputy police chief Shen Shao Bao, the
experiment is already paying golden dividends. Crime rates have
fallen by more than 10 per cent and police detection rates have risen
by 2.6 per cent since the army of silent sentries began surveillance
duty in 2006, he said.
Under the rule of the Communist Party where social control is the
norm, the sudden appearance of lamppost-style security cameras across
the city was never challenged - until an incident in May stoked
concerns that the technology might turn out to be a double-edged
sword.
At the Wang Ye Gardens apartment block 3 kilometres from the Hong
Kong border, residents noticed that a rooftop surveillance camera on
a neighbouring block supposedly monitoring traffic swiveled around
from midnight to 5 am every day and trained its high-powered lens
through their windows.
A local journalist monitored a government website on which CCTV
footage from cameras across the city was made openly available and
saw that the camera was scanning the apartment block for lighted
windows and filming naked women in their bedrooms and bathrooms. The
revelation almost caused a riot.
'People were very, very angry,' a spokesman for Wang Ye Gardens
management said. 'Some of them wanted to go out and smash all the
CCTV cameras. They are still very unhappy about the cameras - but
they are government property, and we can't move them.'
Instead, it served as a wake-up call to the extent to which public
surveillance has developed in Shenzhen.
'It is like the Big Brother era in 1984,' said one of the estate's
residents, Li Xiang. 'After this incident, I realized that as soon as
you step out of your door in this city, you are under CCTV
surveillance.'
It is not only the residents of Wang Ye Gardens who are concerned
about the pervasive use of CCTV cameras. In a one-party state where
activists are jailed for years for opposing the Communist Party,
human rights groups said they fear the technology would be used to
identify and arrest dissidents.
'Activists aren't only followed by secret police in Shenzhen
anymore,' said one Hong Kong-based activist who meets regularly with
underground labour rights groups in China. 'They are concerned that
they are followed everywhere by CCTV cameras as well.
'They may not have face-recognition technology on these CCTV
cameras yet,' the activist said, 'but they can easily be upgraded
when the technology is available, and no one will know.'
But according to Xue Jun Ling, a project manager with Shenzhen
Xinhuo Electronic Engineering, which set up a bank of 38 surveillance
cameras around the city's Civic Centre, person-recognition technology
is already being widely used.
That technology allows the irises, facial features or even the
walking mannerisms of subjects to be checked electronically against a
database of people the police or government security services want to
monitor.
'We already use face-recognition technology in government offices
and in the entrance to shopping malls in Shenzhen,' Xue said.
'The technology is being upgraded day by day, and the connectivity
of different parts of the system to a central monitoring desk is also
being constantly improved,' he said. 'It is a nationwide movement in
China. Even small towns are trying to build up their own systems even
though they don't have the resources that we have here.'
In an extraordinarily frank admission, Xue added: 'We did mobile
surveillance during the Olympics for the Ministry of State Security.
We have surveillance equipment inside a plain vehicle. We park it at
Olympics venues, and it sends data and pictures by satellites to the
ministry.'
A China-based human rights activist who asked not to be named for
her own safety said: 'We're worried that the government is using the
Olympics as an excuse to import this technology from Western
companies. Now the games are over, we are worried they will use that
technology to identify and round up dissidents.'
Xue saw no such dark clouds on the horizon. 'We are the national
leaders in this type of technology,' he said proudly. 'We are the
city of peace, harmony and security.'
For the residents of Wang Ye Gardens, Shenzhen is also the city of
unwarranted intrusion. Embarrassed by last month's revelations, the
city government blocked public access to the government website
showing CCTV footage.
'It isn't good enough,' professor He Bin of Beijing's China
University of Political Science and Law complained to a Shenzhen
newspaper. 'Why didn't the government disclose the names of the
people responsible and reveal the full details of the case?'
As far as human rights groups are concerned, CCTV monitoring could
manifest itself in far more sinister and threatening ways than grainy
footage of naked women in the windows of apartment blocks.
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