Spying app helps Beijing to keep a sharp eye out

Beijing has created a huge security network that will allow the Chinese to watch CCTV footage from around the country on their phones and televisions.

The operation, called Sharp Eyes, inspired by the communist phrase ‘‘the masses have sharp eyes’’, has been devised to encourage China’s 1.3 billion people to spy on each other.

It uses artificial intelligence and face recognition technology to allow the public to watch live footage from security cameras then report suspected illegal activity to the authorities.

Wang Qiang, a scholar at China’s National Defence University of the People’s Liberation Army, told state media: ‘‘Every household can become a monitor terminal, and every villager can be a monitor. This is in line with the CPC’s [Chinese Communist Party] ‘mass line’ tradition, mobilising people’s enthusiasm to boost rural security.’’

After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 Mao Zedong urged his countrymen to monitor and inform on each other.

The new system forms part of China’s rapidly expanding surveillance network, which is the biggest in the world and has prompted concerns among human rights groups which fear that ethnic groups will be victimised.

Xinjiang Province has effectively become a police state after Beijing instructed the local authorities to suppress and silence the region’s 10 million Muslim Uighur minority.

Human rights groups argue that more than 100,000 Muslims are in detention in ‘‘re-education centres’’ in the province, with cameras, iris scanners, DNA collection systems and checkpoints used to monitor the public. Last year security spending in the province reached 58 billion yuan NZ$12.9 billion, a 100 per cent year-on-year increase.

Sharp Eyes was first trialled in late 2015 in areas including China’s southwestern Sichuan province.

By December last year 14,087 villages had adopted the system, with 41,695 security cameras installed. About 152,855 people have installed the app on their phone.

State media claimed that the amount of preventable crimes in areas of the province where Sharp Eyes operated had been halved. The system was credited as being effective as a deterrent and for directly leading to arrests.

In 2016 a fight involving a man with a knife in the village of Jiantai was halted by police after a Sharp Eyes user saw it on his TV.

The system is being started in the countryside because China’s rapid urbanisation has resulted in fewer police being available there. The percentage living in urban areas grew from 26 per cent to 56 per cent between 1990 and 2016. The Times