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China Elevator Stories
China: Surveillance Cameras and Face Scanners
Surveillance in China is nearly all-encompassing.
27/10/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Face scanners are a pretty common sight in China nowadays. They are installed on campuses so that only university personnel and students can enter, at tourist sites so that all visitors are scanned, and even on buses when you get on.
At a university, it works like this: you first have your face photographed a few times and registered at the office responsible for creating face scanning accounts. Once all your information is saved in the system, you can enter or leave the campus simply by scanning your face. Every time you enter or leave, your name will appear on the face scanner once the scanner has identified you. These scanners use very advanced technology—they can identify you even if you wear sunglasses and from different angles. The entrances have automatic doors that only open for people registered to work or live on the campus.
I’m not generally a fan of face scanners, but I understand that some countries have—or had—severe problems with criminals, violent incidents, terrorists, or similar threats.
When my children were little and attending kindergarten in Siping, an older man once came to their school to act as a “kidnapper” in a safety drill. This may sound a bit shocking—3 and 4 year old children in China practicing what to do in case of a kidnapping—but China had a serious problem with such cases. Kindergarten teachers always ensured that anyone picking up children was registered and that they would not release children to anyone else, even people claiming to be relatives.
My sons initially thought the actor was a real kidnapper carrying a gun (which was fake) and didn’t realize it was just a drill. They replayed the scenario at home for months afterward, as it was psychologically challenging to process. The teachers had barricaded the children in classrooms and hidden with them behind desks, making sure they were safe. Although this might seem extreme to someone from Austria, such practices were meant to protect children rather than traumatize them.
Children also used to be kidnapped at train stations and other places that are filled with masses of people, where it used to be easy to kidnap a child when their parent was looking the other way or otherwise busy. These kidnappings happened just as frequently, according to what I had heard, and children were purportedly sold into beggar rings or other families. Some news showed incidents where parents were reunited with their children once they were grown-ups and could search for their parents, often with the parents already having searched for their children everywhere across the country. Some children still had a few memories of their homes or families, and though some did not remember much, others remembered just enough to know they used to live somewhere else with another family, depending on the age.
In Beijing, I often came across beggars, and these children were often instrumentalized, with some having their bones broken so some would suffer some kind of disability, which was a means to have other people pity them and give them money, probably only having some or none of the money going to the children, but most (or probably all) to the person or organization doing the kidnappings. The cruelties of such kidnappers are unimaginable for any normal person, and the children are the true victims.
I also remember incidents where adult men ran into Chinese kindergartens with Chinese knives, killing many children in a knife-wielding rampage. Such incidents may possibly be stopped, at least in certain circumstances, by the installation of face scanners.
Such systems reduce opportunities for people to commit crimes. While they don’t make you completely safe, they can provide a sense of relative security, especially if you’ve ever dealt with real threats to your life—like my psychopathic ex, who tried to have me killed twice back when I was living in Austria.
In Tai’an, I felt fairly safe, knowing it was unlikely that he would send someone after me with these safety measures in place.
I believe using such measures always depends on the severity of a problem. If a threat has become severe enough that other solutions are ineffective, face scanners and similar measures can prevent quite a few crimes, at least those that might happen in public spaces.
I don’t know of any statistics showing that easily identifiable potential criminals are less likely to commit murder. Some crimes happen impulsively, while others are planned. For the latter, these security measures should be sufficient to keep potential perpetrators away from you—at least while you’re on campus.
In China, many other areas are also under surveillance, which can help prevent crimes or assist in identifying a murderer after an incident occurs. While nobody would want such crimes to happen, surveillance can provide clues that may lead to an arrest—assuming the police are honest and motivated to solve crimes. Police effectiveness varies by city and country. In some places I’ve visited, officials seem more concerned with keeping crime statistics low than truly addressing criminal activity. (I won’t name the country, but it isn’t China.)
What do you think about surveillance?