Cataclysm - China and surveillance

During my research for Cataclysm, I learned that, like Britain and the United States, China has one of the most pervasive citizen surveillance operations in the world. Besides some of the strictest internet access controls by any government, the country also boasts an expensive and sophisticated CCTV network (over 30 million cameras), on highways, in public parks, on balconies, in elevators, in taxis, and at sporting stadiums – a constant eye on the streets, searching for anything that could suggest criminal activity or a looming terror attack. They’re also intended to maintain ‘social stability’ – which could be construed as shutting up critics.

That fact posed a few issues for me. How could Cat hope to conspire against the Cerberus factory plants in China if everywhere is under surveillance?

Surveillance cameras - Wikipedia commons

Well, monitoring such an immense system has to be a gargantuan task for any administration. So there must be many blind spots. And I’m assured by someone who has been to China frequently that the CCTV cameras do not intrude on normal day-to-day living. Just don’t openly plot the government’s overthrow…


There’s another aspect that affects the efficiency of the system.


Smog is now such a problem in China’s cities that its surveillance cameras can no longer see through the thick layers of pollution that choke the streets on an almost daily basis. The authorities believe that there is a real fear that terrorists could take advantage of these increasingly frequent hazes to carry out attacks and flee unseen.


Existing technology, such as the infrared cameras used by firefighters as they move through smoke-filled buildings, can help see through smog at a certain density, but when it reaches the concentration found on some Chinese streets, even that is shown to be useless.


Some experts have claimed that in many Chinese cities the pollution particles are so compressed that they block light almost as effectively as a brick wall. [Cat encounters thick fog, too.]


Killers have been identified, shoplifters have been deterred, and criminal suspects have been apprehended thanks to such surveillance.


Naturally, there are human rights issues here, too. Even modest freedoms may be curtailed by such monitoring. Certainly facial recognition technology is being refined – and indeed is used in my novel Cataclysm. As yet, such technology is not effective in streets, due to the lighting variety – shadows, shade from buildings, passing vehicles etc. And there is no sci-fi style all-seeing eye … yet.


Cataclysm – e-book now available, published by Crooked Cat

http://authl.it/B01953NVY4

Writing - research - update

I’m getting to the end of the novel set mainly in China (Shanghai and Nanjing) and this has involved quite a lot of interesting research, most of which won’t appear in the book (happily, say most readers!) – subjects such as:

Architecture

Surveillance
Food and farming
Pollution
Grand Canal
Wuxi district
Sino-Japanese relations
Corruption

An immense and fascinating country, with stoic and long-suffering people, and influenced by complex even contradictory politics. Yes, there are considerable human rights issues – and privacy and health concerns – and these will be touched upon, though not too much as the book is a thriller, after all!

The country’s most recent reform era began in 1978, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that free market ideas started to have a major impact on smaller cities. Locals coped with overwhelming change: the end of government-assigned jobs, the sudden privatisation of housing.

 

Pollution is serious. Not only dirty air, but contaminated soil and water. Yet action is being taken to combat this (whether fast enough is another matter.) For example, all local cabs and buses in Fuling now run on natural gas, in order to reduce pollution. Hundreds of factories bordering Lake Tai (a huge freshwater lake at risk) have been closed down or moved.

Here are some quotations from a 2013 National Geographic: There is an old saying of China: Dog loves house in spite of being poor; son loves mother in spite of being ugly. That’s our feeling. Today we are working hard, and tomorrow we will do what we can for our country.

Since the late 1970s, about 155 million people have migrated to the cities from the countryside.

Three Gorges Dam is the largest concrete structure on Earth – 5 times as wide as the Hoover Dam.