China goes high-tech with security gadgets
Exhibition boasts Republic’s rise in domestic safety tools
BEIJING: From virtual reality police training programmes to gun-toting drones and iris scanners, a public security expo in China showed the range of increasingly high-tech tools available to the country’s police.
The exhibition, which ended yesterday in Beijing, emphasised surveillance and monitoring technology just as the Communist government’s domestic security spending has skyrocketed.
Facial-recognition screens analysing candid shots of conference attendees were scattered around the exhibition hall, while other vendors packed their booths with security cameras.
More innocuous applications, like smart locks for homes and big data applications to reduce traffic congestion, also occupied large swathes of the conference.
But the high-end devices on display highlighted the emphasis that China has put on equipping its security forces with gear of the future.
Megvii, an artificial intelligence company backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, demoed different pairs of “smart” sunglasses, which sound an alarm when they spot a suspect.
And they don’t come cheap – one pair costs around 20,000 yuan (RM12,000), according to an employee manning Megvii’s booth.
Similar eyewear made global headlines in February when police in the central city of Zhengzhou used them to spot potential suspects in a crowded train station.
Multiple companies also showed off iris scanners, which specialise in detecting and matching unique patterns on the iris, the coloured part of the human eye.
“From foetal stage to adolescence to adulthood, the iris stays the same,” James Wang, marketing director at IrisKing, said.
Compared to fingerprinting and facial recognition, the error rate for matching irises is also lower.
“Since iris recognition is done in vivo, it’s also very hard to fake,” he added.
China spent an estimated 1.24 trillion yuan (RM743bil) on domestic security in 2017, a 12.4% increase from the year before, according to a March report by Adrian Zenz, a China security expert at Germany’s European School of Culture and Theology.
Bolstering security in China’s minority regions has been a priority, according to Zenz’s report.
In Tibet, where numerous Tibetans have self-immolated in protest at Beijing’s policies over the years, domestic security spending rose more than 400% between 2007 and 2016 – almost double the growth in spending across all provinces and regions for the same period.
In the restive northwest region of Xinjiang, where the government has used an array of surveillance equipment, the security spending spree ballooned nearly 100% in 2017 – twice its spending on healthcare, according to Zenz.