Sunday 15 November 2009
Mainland turns to hi-tech snooping
Take a stroll along the streets of Shenzhen and look up - you will see them everywhere, on building walls, light posts, under bridges, at street corners. Digital surveillance cameras - an estimated 800,000 of them - are peering into every nook and cranny of the border city, analysing the flow of people, alerting police to suspicious gatherings and ensuring no crime is likely to go unseen.
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Mainland turns to hi-tech snooping
Cities step up use of surveillance systems
Fiona Tam in Shenzhen
04 November 2009
Take a stroll along the streets of Shenzhen and look up - you will see them everywhere, on building walls, light posts, under bridges, at street corners. Digital surveillance cameras - an estimated 800,000 of them - are peering into every nook and cranny of the border city, analysing the flow of people, alerting police to suspicious gatherings and ensuring no crime is likely to go unseen.
Shenzhen is at the forefront of a security revolution on the mainland. Where once street committees and neighbourhood grannies did much of the state’s snooping on its citizenry, technological advances and a rapidly expanding security budget mean the streets of 660 of the mainland’s 676 cities now come under the watchful gaze of more sophisticated eyes in the sky.
The aim is to curb crime and better manage the huge migrant population, but critics say the cameras are an invasion of privacy and have done little to prevent crime.
The surveillance industry has grown at a rate of 30 to 40 per cent a year since the central government launched the “Gold Shield Project” in 2003. According to the Ministry of Finance, this year’s national budget for public security is 116 billion yuan (HK$132 billion). This includes installing digital surveillance and data-analysis systems - known as the “sky net” - on all streets and in entertainment venues, public places and transport.
Security concerns over last year’s Beijing Olympics, this year’s National Day parade and next year’s Shanghai World Expo and Asian Games in Guangzhou have prompted greater demand for surveillance systems, bringing staggering profits to the mainland’s surveillance industry, which was estimated to be worth US$17.5 billion last year, equivalent to 0.8 per cent of GDP.
The industry is expected to grow to US$43 billion by 2010, according to the China Public Security Guide published by the Chinese Security and Protection Association.
Terence Yap Wing-khai, vice-chairman of Shenzhen-based China Security & Surveillance Technology - the industry leader - said security companies also stood to benefit from Beijing’s 4 trillion yuan economic stimulus plan.
Yap expects the government will increase spending on security from US$20 billion to US$35 billion this year, with a good chunk of that extra money going on surveillance as the dip in exports and subsequent lay-offs caused by the global financial crisis raise the authorities’ fears of increased social unrest.
Yap’s company recorded revenue of US$427 million last year, and he expects it to reach US$600 million to US$630 million this year.
In Shenzhen, there are many companies manufacturing security systems. The city accounts for more than 40 per cent of the national output of surveillance cameras, many of which are shipped overseas. Destinations include London, widely regarded as the world’s surveillance capital. Shenzhen’s deputy police chief has been quoted by local media as saying the Chinese boom town had learned from London’s experience.
Elsewhere in Guangdong, official figures show there are 250,000 surveillance cameras installed in Guangzhou, 100,000 each in Foshan, Dongguan and Zhongshan, and 50,000 each in Zhuhai and Huizhou. Industry experts estimate the province has spent more than 12 billion yuan on surveillance cameras.
According to Guangdong police, the latest intelligent cameras can analyse the flow of people and identify the potential for brawls or unusual gatherings. Authorities arrested more than 40,000 suspects between 2005 and 2008 with the help of surveillance systems, police said.
Even in remote Inner Mongolia, authorities plan to install 400,000 cameras by 2012, according to Sun Fengming, deputy director of the autonomous region’s public security bureau.
China is not alone in going camera crazy. In Britain, for example, there are an estimated 4.2 million cameras which do everything from help police track criminals to ensure people properly dispose of their rubbish.
Li Wei, an anti-terrorism expert with the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, said surveillance cameras had already become the “usual way” to fight crime on the mainland.
“Closed-circuit television enables police to solve criminal cases quickly as well as prevent crimes by deterring potential offenders,” he said.
Li Yunfeng, deputy police bureau chief from Kunming in Yunnan province, told the Ninth China Public Security Forum in Shenzhen on Sunday that Kunming had seen crime rates drop 10 per cent annually in the past two years after spending hundreds of millions of yuan installing 310,000 cameras citywide.
Internationally, the effectiveness of cameras in preventing crime has been questioned.
In London, only one crime was solved for each 1,000 surveillance cameras last year, according to police figures, while British media reported that only 3 per cent of street robberies were solved using images from surveillance cameras.
Zhang Jingtong , a software engineer from Shenzhen, said he didn’t feel safer when walking on streets with cameras as they weren’t able to intervene in an emergency.
“I understand cameras provide clues to help police solve cases. But they don’t reduce suffering, say, when you are stabbed by thieves.”
In June, at least eight surveillance cameras filmed an unemployed 62-year-old man boarding a bus in Chengdu with a can of petrol, and then setting it alight.
Police identified the suicide-arsonist thanks to the footage. But the cameras did not prevent a committed assailant from killing himself and 26 other people, and injuring 76.
Even the most stringent security operation of the year - which saw Beijing locked down and under armed guard in the run-up to National Day celebrations on October 1 - could not prevent a pair of knife attacks a stone’s throw from Tiananmen Square.
Qian Cong and Shen Huizhang from the Jiangsu Police Institute in Nanjing said petitioners and the disadvantaged were the main cause of crimes that would not be prevented by cameras.
“Many of the country’s public policies don’t consider, or even violate, the interests of disadvantaged groups. [The situation is worrying] considering that these kind of disadvantaged groups number 140 to 180 million people and many of them resort to extreme methods after year-long petitions,” the two wrote in an article submitted to the forum.
But rather than listening to petitioners’ complaints and attempting to solve them, the two suggested closely monitoring petitioners and analysing trends.
Privacy is also a concern. In May last year, two security guards in Shenzhen were sacked when they used cameras to watch women bathing in nearby buildings. Footage taken of naked people was broadcast on Shenzhen’s police website.
But the privacy argument was rarely heard at the forum. Police chiefs did not consider it a concern, and industry experts said low public awareness meant there was little objection to the proliferation of cameras on mainland streets.
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