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China: Surveillance State or Way of the Future?
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China: Surveillance State or Way of the Future?

EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]

China has built the largest network of surveillance cameras on earth, and this film follows the engineers, officials, and ordinary citizens living inside it. Facial recognition systems track pedestrians on the street, sort them by identity within seconds, and feed into local social credit programs that can reward good behavior or restrict access to trains, loans, and travel for infractions as small as jaywalking. Interviews with tech company representatives frame the system as a fix for a low-trust society, giving people a functioning ID and payment infrastructure in a fraction of the time it took the West. Footage from control rooms and city streets shows the scale of the buildout, while skeptics, including researchers and residents, raise the obvious question of what happens when a government that controls the courts also controls the cameras. The film moves between Shenzhen's tech campuses and smaller cities piloting credit scores, letting both boosters and critics make their case before asking whether this is a preview of surveillance everywhere else.