China’s 600 Million Cameras
China operates an estimated 600 million surveillance cameras. That’s roughly one camera for every 2.3 people. Our Sentinel database has almost no China coverage. Here’s why, and why it matters.
Why we can’t map China
Sentinel’s data comes from three types of sources, none of which work for China:
Government open data: Chinese surveillance data is classified, not published on open data portals.
OpenStreetMap: OSM mapping in China is limited by legal restrictions on geographic data. The man_made=surveillance tag is rarely used by Chinese mappers.
Public records: Chinese surveillance procurement and deployment data is not available through FOIA-equivalent mechanisms.
What we know
Despite the data gap, research and reporting have revealed:
- Sharp Eyes: A program connecting public and private cameras into a unified government monitoring system
- Social credit integration: Camera footage feeding into behavioral scoring systems
- Facial recognition at scale: Megvii, SenseTime, and Hikvision deploy AI-powered recognition across cities
- Predictive policing: Camera data used to identify “suspicious” behavior and flag individuals preemptively
Why this matters globally
Chinese surveillance companies (Hikvision, Dahua, ZTE) sell equipment worldwide. The same infrastructure deployed in Chinese cities is being exported to countries across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America through Belt and Road Initiative partnerships.
The 600 million cameras in China represent the most advanced surveillance infrastructure on Earth. Understanding it, even without mapping individual cameras, is essential context for the global surveillance landscape.
What Sentinel does show
While we can’t map cameras in China, we can map Chinese surveillance technology exports in other countries. Our database includes cameras manufactured by Hikvision and Dahua in multiple countries where operators are tagged.
See the global surveillance landscape on Sentinel. The gaps in our map are as informative as the data points.