Surveillance cameras at Tiananmen Square in 2009. In 2019, Comparitech reported that 8 out of 10 of the most monitored cities in the world are in China.
A prominent biomedical researcher in China wants the country to establish a Skynet-type surveillance system for tracking diseases like Covid-19. Cheng Jing, a professor at Tsinghua University’s Medical Systems Biology Research Centre, proposed an automatic monitoring and reporting system for epidemic control that relies on artificial intelligence and 5G. The professor, who is also a deputy to the county’s National People's Congress, compared it to Skynet, China’s vast video surveillance system