Fun With Data – China Sez
5 Year Plans are big with the Chinese government and the Japanese press has indicated that the Central Cybersecurity & Information Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCICCPOC?) has announced their 5 year plan for strengthening its competitiveness and building a national information plan under the auspices of ‘enhancing the convenience of the people through the advancement of information technology.” Among the plan details are to increase the number of Chinese internet users from today’s 989m to 1.2b by 2025, which would be an increase in penetration from 15% to 56% over the same period, and to increase the revenue generated by e-commerce from the current $1.846t to 2.67t, a ~44.6% increase. The plan also focuses on improving both government efficiency and corporate digital competitiveness, by increasing the percentage of permits issued by provincial level governments from 80% currently to 90% in 2025, and increasing the R&D expenses in manufacturing sales from 2.35% in 2020 to 3.2%.
The plan also emphases speeding up the establishment of an IoT network that connects 5G mobile communication systems with automated driving, energy, and medical services, which it will eventually connect to domestic GPS systems, which would allow ground based sensors to communicate directly with drones and surveillance systems, essentially converging big data, IoT, artificial intelligence and surveillance cameras as part of an anti-terrorism network, a bit more dystopian than one might expect in a 5 year plan. However the underlying principal is based on the simple comment by China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping, who stated “There is no modernization without information.”
While most folks believe that Chinese cities are the ones with the most surveillance cameras, it turns out that the two cities with the most CCTV cameras/km2 are Chennai and Hyderabad, India, with 657 and 480, which comes to one camera in every 131 ft2. or one camera for every 39 people in the city. The Chinese city with the most CCTV cameras is Harbin, with 411/km2, while Beijing is 10th with 278/kn2. (London is 4th at 399/km2). As China’s implementation of facial recognition has allowed it to build a vast facial database, the use of such data has been part of the government’s ‘blacklist/whitelist’ social programs that can go as far as matching faces on jaywalkers or those that eat on public transportation, and then blacklist them, which limits their ability to travel and can go as far as alerting residents near an offender, asking them to turn in the blacklisted resident.
While there have been legitimate court cases in China that placed limitations on the use of facial data in a number of circumstances, particularly by private companies, the government has access to that database and can use it for whatever purposes it desires. All in, building out IoT infrastructure has a bit of a different meaning in China than it does in the US, at least for now, and does not quite seem to be only for ‘enhancing the convenience of the people.”
The plan also emphases speeding up the establishment of an IoT network that connects 5G mobile communication systems with automated driving, energy, and medical services, which it will eventually connect to domestic GPS systems, which would allow ground based sensors to communicate directly with drones and surveillance systems, essentially converging big data, IoT, artificial intelligence and surveillance cameras as part of an anti-terrorism network, a bit more dystopian than one might expect in a 5 year plan. However the underlying principal is based on the simple comment by China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping, who stated “There is no modernization without information.”
While most folks believe that Chinese cities are the ones with the most surveillance cameras, it turns out that the two cities with the most CCTV cameras/km2 are Chennai and Hyderabad, India, with 657 and 480, which comes to one camera in every 131 ft2. or one camera for every 39 people in the city. The Chinese city with the most CCTV cameras is Harbin, with 411/km2, while Beijing is 10th with 278/kn2. (London is 4th at 399/km2). As China’s implementation of facial recognition has allowed it to build a vast facial database, the use of such data has been part of the government’s ‘blacklist/whitelist’ social programs that can go as far as matching faces on jaywalkers or those that eat on public transportation, and then blacklist them, which limits their ability to travel and can go as far as alerting residents near an offender, asking them to turn in the blacklisted resident.
While there have been legitimate court cases in China that placed limitations on the use of facial data in a number of circumstances, particularly by private companies, the government has access to that database and can use it for whatever purposes it desires. All in, building out IoT infrastructure has a bit of a different meaning in China than it does in the US, at least for now, and does not quite seem to be only for ‘enhancing the convenience of the people.”
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