From One Beijing Corner to Nationwide Control: Inside Chinas Surveillance State

Standing outside Beijing’s Haidian Station during President Donald Trump’s state visit to China, Fox News anchor Bret Baier counted at least 20 surveillance cameras on a single street corner. Within two minutes of his crew’s driver parking illegally, a fine of approximately $40 arrived by text message on the driver’s phone.“Big Brother is watching,” Baier told viewers of “Special Report” on May 13. “There are literally cameras everywhere in Beijing. In fact, in Beijing, they have added 1,500 cameras just this year alone. They see everything.”Baier added: “There are real questions about what the [Chinese Communist Party’s] goal is—about citizen tracking and social scoring. They say it’s to make everybody feel safe. ”What Baier encountered at street level reflects a surveillance infrastructure assembled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over two decades through overlapping national programs, each built on the one before it—and now being accelerated by artificial intelligence.From Skynet to Sharp Eyes: Building Total CoverageThe CCP’s mass surveillance network was constructed in successive layers, each formally documented in official government directives.According to a 2020 report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), the foundation of the surveillance architecture is the Skynet project, launched in 2005 by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which deployed cameras across 16 provinces connected to facial recognition databases held by the MPS and the National Citizen Identity Information Center. The Skynet network was completed in 2017, encompassing at the time 176 million cameras with round-the-clock coverage of major roads, schools, commercial districts, and transportation hubs.Chinese state media Workers’ Daily reported in 2018 that the Skynet system’s dynamic facial recognition technology could identify more than 40 facial features and accurately recognize faces under varying angles, lighting conditions, and dynamic or static environments. The outlet claimed the system could perform 3 billion comparisons per second, allowing it to scan China’s entire population in one second and the world’s population in two seconds. CSET assessed that claim as ignoring “glaring technical limitations,” while noting that the system’s capabilities remain formidable.In 2015, the CCP expanded its ambitions dramatically. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), together with the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the MPS, and six other central government agencies, formally launched the Sharp Eyes project.The NDRC directive mandated that video surveillance cover “100% of China’s public areas and key industries” by 2020, with an “omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully controllable” system operating “at all levels” of government down to local party committees. The document specified “no blind spots” in coverage of major roads, densely populated areas, and “important foreign-related sites.”Where Skynet covered public urban spaces, Sharp Eyes went further: It connected existing public security cameras with private residential and commercial cameras, rural TV networks, and household monitoring terminals into a single unified police network feeding into local command and control centers. Under Sharp Eyes, residents in pilot areas could watch live security footage through special TV boxes and summon police directly.Minxin Pei, a political scientist and professor at Claremont McKenna College who has written extensively on the CCP’s surveillance state, noted in a 2024 analysis in The Diplomat that China has developed “well-honed surveillance tactics that focus on priority targets,” combining labor-intensive monitoring with AI-enabled automation in a way that makes the system more effective than either approach alone.AI Turbocharges the SystemA December 2025 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found that estimates for the number of surveillance cameras operating across China go up to 600 million, and that the CCP is integrating artificial intelligence across that network to make it substantially more powerful.Huang Yongzhen, CEO of Watrix, demonstrates his company’s gait recognition software at its offices in Beijing on Oct. 31, 2018. The startup hopes to begin selling software that recognizes people by their body shape and how they walk, enabling identification when faces are hidden. Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, the technology is raising concerns about how far surveillance will go. Mark Schiefelbein/APDocuments from a Shanghai district cited in the ASPI report describe plans for AI-powered cameras and drones to “automatically discover and intelligently enforce the law,” including alerting police to crowd gatherings before they form.China’s Supreme People’s Court directed in a December 2022 opinion that all courts should develop functional artificial intelligence systems by 2025 to provide comprehensive support across judicial proceedings, including trials.Surveillance as a WeaponThe network’s reach extends well beyond traffic enforcement. It functions as the primary detection mechanism for any activity the CCP designates as a threat—including peaceful exercise of religious faith.The UK Home Office’s November 2025 Country Policy and Information Note on China, a formal government assessment used in asylum and legal proceedings, found that between January 2022 and April 2024, at least 142 Falun Gong practitioners were detained after being identified by surveillance cameras while practicing or sharing information peacefully. The document states that surveillance “becomes more intense around politically sensitive dates or major government events.”Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered on the principles of truth, compassion, and tolerance. Introduced to the public in China in the early 1990s, it gained widespread popularity, reaching between 70 million and 100 million practitioners by the end of the decade, according to official estimates at the time.In July 1999, the CCP, fearing that Falun Gong’s popularity threatened the regime’s power, launched a brutal campaign to eradicate the practice. Since then, many have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death from forced organ harvesting.Three cases reported by Minghui.org, a website documenting firsthand experiences of Falun Gong practitioners, within the past two weeks illustrate how the CCP’s surveillance system operates in practice—and how it reaches from university campuses to the homes of the elderly.Wu Qingzhi, 89, of Guiyang City, Guizhou Province, was photographed by a surveillance camera while distributing Falun Gong informational materials in 2025. She was sentenced in December 2025 to one year in prison. She is currently held at Yangai Prison, according to Minghui.org’s May 11 report.Sun Yanfang, of Qinhui Garden residential compound, Doudian Yuzhuang Village, Fangshan District, Beijing, was arrested at her home on the afternoon of May 7, 2026, by five or six police officers who arrived with surveillance photographs in hand. According to a May 10 report, the officers showed her the photographs and asked: “Is this you?” They then asked where she had obtained the materials she was seen distributing. When she told them she had made them herself, police confiscated all of her Falun Dafa books before taking her into custody.The third case documents a different dimension of the surveillance architecture: its penetration into academic institutions. On April 3, 2026, officers from the Wenquan Police Station in Xianning City, Hubei Province, arrived unannounced at a laboratory at Hubei University of Science and Technology—an action described in a May 4 report as highly irregular. The purpose, as later became clear, was to inspect what was already in place: Police had connected the surveillance cameras on the floors where Falun Gong practitioners worked directly into the public security system’s monitoring network, enabling officers to track practitioners’ movements—their arrival and departure times, their daily routines—without ever setting foot on campus.The three cases span Guizhou, Beijing, and Hubei—three regions more than a thousand miles apart—and were reported within a single week. Minghui.org’s annual report for 2025 documented 751 Falun Gong practitioners newly reported as sentenced—spanning 26 of China’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions—along with 124 verified practitioner deaths. Minghui.org notes that due to the CCP’s strict censorship of information leaving China, both figures almost certainly understate the actual scale.The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2025 Annual Report stated that Chinese authorities “continued to target Falun Gong,” with practitioners facing arrest, imprisonment, and death.Export of Techno-AuthoritarianismThe technology powering this surveillance infrastructure is a Chinese export product.Hikvision and Dahua—both added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List in 2019 for their role in building surveillance systems in Xinjiang—remain the world’s largest surveillance camera manufacturers by unit volume. Together they held nearly 40 percent of the global market in 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence, and continue to supply governments across Asia, Africa, and Latin America through third-party distribution networks.A 2019 study by the CSIS Reconnecting Asia Project identified 73 Huawei “Safe City” contracts across 52 countries—a figure representing the baseline before Huawei faced partial exclusion from Western markets. The Institute of Development Studies subsequently documented Chinese firms providing smart surveillance infrastructure to Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt, including systems with integrated facial recognition capabilities.Human Rights Watch has documented how Chinese technology companies export not only surveillance hardware but also operational models and practices that enable governments to deploy these systems against political opposition and civil society. In its 2021 report “China’s Techno-Authoritarianism Has Gone Global,” the organization warned that countries adopting Chinese surveillance tools are increasingly replicating Beijing’s approach of using technology to monitor and suppress dissent.In his 2024 testimony before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson described China’s integrated Skynet surveillance and Social Credit systems as giving the Chinese Communist Party “full control over access to everything [citizens] possess electronically—most ominously their savings and access to travel.”For Bret Baier’s crew, the encounter cost $40 and produced a television segment. For the millions of Chinese citizens living under the network’s coverage, the calculus is different.