By NG HAN GUAN, ANDY WONG, AARON FAVILA and DAKE KANG
BEIJING, China (AP) — The Chinese government has blanketed the country with the world’s largest network of surveillance cameras.
Some cameras swivel, ensuring sweeping views of public squares. Others scan license plates of passing cars, allowing police to track vehicles in real-time. At night, cameras light up across China’s cities, shining lights down alleys and corners.
Over the past few decades, the Chinese government has rolled out a series of high-tech surveillance projects aimed at bringing the entire country under watch, including “Sky Net” and the “Golden Shield”.
The latest such project is called the “Xueliang Project,” or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a quote from Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, who once said “the people have sharp eyes” when urging them to root out neighbors opposed to socialist values.
AP investigations have found that American companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. The U.S. government repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, AP found.
The cameras studding China are knitted together in policing systems that allow authorities to track and control virtually anyone in the country, often targeting perceived threats to the state like dissidents, religious believers or ethnic minorities. Following directives from Beijing to ensure “100 percent coverage” in key public areas, authorities have installed facial-recognition cameras across the country, including in unlikely locations:
Ski slopes.
Beaches.
Remote country roads.
The Great Wall of China.
A slew of cameras greets visitors to Beijing, with a screen underneath announcing: “Amazing China travel starts here!”
-
A worker naps near a security camera along a deserted beach near Sanya city in southern China’s Hainan province, Saturday, April 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
1 of 19
A worker naps near a security camera along a deserted beach near Sanya city in southern China’s Hainan province, Saturday, April 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
At times, entire neighborhoods have been demolished and rebuilt in part to make it easier for cameras to keep watch. The historic quarter of Xinjiang’s ancient silk road city of Kashgar, once a maze-like warren of twisting alleys, was demolished and rebuilt with wider avenues and thousands of camera that light up at night.
China’s cities, roads and villages are now studded with more cameras than the rest of the world combined, analysts say — roughly one for every two people.
The goal is clear, according to authorities: Total surveillance in every corner of the country, with “no blind spots” to be found.
This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.
