Features
10.30.20

State of Surveillance

Jessica Batke & Mareike Ohlberg
Across China, in its most crowded cities and tiniest hamlets, government officials are on an unprecedented surveillance shopping spree. The coordination of the resulting millions of cameras and other snooping technology spread across the country...
10.30.20

Xiqiao Township’s Hierarchy of Human Needs

ChinaFile’s translation of an excerpt from a July 2019 procurement notice, issued by the Comprehensive Management, Petitioning, and Stability Maintenance Office in Xiqiao township, Guangdong province. The excerpt describes local officials’ plans...

10.30.20

Key Takeaways

“State of Surveillance,” a new report from ChinaFile, relies on an analysis of a new database of some 76,000 publicly available Chinese government procurement notices related to the purchases of surveillance technology and services across China...

10.30.20

Budgeting for Surveillance

The work of buying and building out surveillance infrastructure in China largely falls to local governments. Numerous localities and agencies make purchases as they implement a range of centrally-mandated surveillance projects and campaigns....

10.30.20

The Surveillance Bureaucracy

The Chinese government’s surveillance capabilities, while vast and impressive, do not result from one monolithic project. Rather, various central and local government and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entities have participated in a series of...

Xiqiao Township Facial Recognition System Construction Program

Chinese Government Procurement Network

In 2019, the Comprehensive Management, Petitioning, and Stability Maintenance Office in Xiqiao township, Foshan city issued a procurement notice for a new facial recognition surveillance system. Included with the notice was this supplemental...

10.30.20

Cameras and Software

To reach their goal of monitoring all of China’s key public spaces, local authorities need to buy a lot of cameras and other technology. The approximately 76,000 surveillance-related procurement notices ChinaFile analyzed offer a glimpse into the...

10.30.20

Methodology

ChinaFile’s research for “State of Surveillance” relied primarily on a dataset comprising some 76,000 procurement notices that central and local government offices posted for goods and services related to surveillance. This article explains how...