China’s almost-all-seeing government has let it be known that the country’s hotels no longer have to scan the faces of guests as they are checking in.
Great news, right? No.
Doesn’t mean a thing. As Radio Free Asia reports, “Residents say people are constantly scanned in public anyway” (April 25, 2024).
Last year, Chinese authorities in the eastern city of Hangzhou installed facial recognition cameras in the spyholes of hotels as part of a slew of tight security measures ahead of the 19th Asian Games in September.
Now, the authorities seem to be rolling back such measures, although it’s unclear why….
An IT professional who gave only the surname Xu for fear of reprisals said the move could have something to do with the fact that there are approximately 610,000 hotels and guesthouses in China, each with its own scanner, as well as hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras with facial and full-body recognition capabilities.
“If the database hasn’t been properly designed, and lacks storage capacity and processing power to cope with the demands of such massive amounts of data, it will overload,” Xu said….
Media reports and security consultancies have estimated that China is home to hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras….
Facial recognition is already widely in place across the country, and [a Shanghai resident who gave only the surname Chen for fear of reprisals] said she doesn’t see how rolling back the use of scans in hotels will change the ongoing mass surveillance of China’s 1.4 billion population.
“As soon as you go out, your face gets scanned,” Chen said. “There are hundreds of cameras pointing at you from all directions, and your image gets immediately uploaded to a big database for verification.”
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is subject to only near-total surveillance by the state, not total surveillance.
Smith is able to secretly record his outlawed thoughts in a private journal because the telescreen that dominates his living room has no view of the alcove where he keeps his diary.
He can also secretly spend time with a woman who is a fellow thought criminal by renting a flat in the prole part of town. The proles are the lower-class citizens of Oceania. The parts of town where they live are apparently not subject to the same level of surveillance as the parts where people like Smith live.
Even in Smith’s world, the world of Big Brother, with telescreens in every room and spies everywhere, a person who is sufficiently perceptive and calculating can shave enough slivers of private existence to almost have a life.
But such victories are fleeting and illusory. Somehow Smith gives himself away, maybe by not being as consistently enthusiastic as everybody else during the Two Minutes Hate. In any case, O’Brien becomes aware of him, and soon it’s all over. To find Smith’s journal, all the overseers need to do is search his apartment when he isn’t around. To find his hideaway in the prole part of town, all they need to do is follow him there—or have an agent already in place.
Of course, in modern China, the state’s prohibitions, ambitions, and technology differ in many ways from those of Orwell’s 75-year-old imaginings, informed by the details of his own day.
Certain things are the same. Big Brother watches you in the China of 2024, using technology and spies. As long as you do not belong to an especially targeted group, you can probably enjoy some scraps of privacy. You can probably record counterrevolutionary thoughts in a secret journal that the Chinese Communist Party will never know about while you are alive. Just don’t try to express yourself online or on the street.
