A ranking of China’s most heavily surveilled cities began circulating online in early April, quickly drawing a surge of public reaction.
The figures, compiled and posted by the social media commentator known as “Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher” on X, put numbers to something many Chinese residents already experience in daily life: an environment saturated with cameras. When the video appeared on April 6, the comment stream filled almost immediately. Some viewers reduced it to a blunt ratio, saying there were now as many cameras as people.
Shanghai topped the list, with roughly 15.06 million cameras for a permanent population of 24.8 million, about one camera for every 1.6 residents. Beijing followed with approximately 11.16 million, or one for every two people. Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Tianjin came next, each with several million devices already in place. Shenzhen, Nanjing, Chengdu, Xi’an, and Wuhan rounded out the top ten. In certain neighborhoods, residents say, the density is far higher than these citywide averages suggest.
Across the country, estimates vary, but most place the total number of cameras in the hundreds of millions. Some online commentators, citing figures they attributed to official data, put the number above 800 million, arguing that China operates more surveillance cameras than the rest of the world combined. Radio Free Asia has reported that the system extends through public streets, commercial spaces, and neighborhood-level monitoring networks, reaching deep into both urban and rural areas.
The system’s reach is not accidental. It has been built layer by layer.
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Zhang, a resident of Tengzhou in Shandong province, described what happens when ordinary people rely on it. “If your car gets scratched or stolen, the cameras can’t find anything,” he told Radio Free Asia. “If your child goes missing, they can’t find anything either.”
A Shanghai resident who gave his surname as Zheng offered a different perspective, describing how the same network operates when the target is political.
Authorities had placed him on a government watchlist, classified as part of what officials call the “key population,” a designation that can include petitioners, dissidents, former prisoners, and individuals viewed as politically unreliable. Around his home, multiple cameras were installed by different layers of local administration, often without coordination.
“There are three or four cameras just around my building,” Zheng said. “Some belong to the municipal police, some to the district police, and others to the neighborhood committee or the street office. Several are pointed directly at my home. It’s common to have four or five cameras in front of your window and another four or five at the back.”
He said older surveillance systems required people like him to report their movements in advance. That step is no longer necessary.
“From the moment you leave your door to the main road, everything is connected,” he said. “Wherever you go, they know. There’s basically no privacy left.”
In Taixing, a city in Jiangsu province, another resident, surnamed Lu, said the system serves more practical purposes for local authorities.
“The government uses fines as a revenue stream,” he said. “Drive a car, make one wrong move, and you get a ticket. And then there’s stability maintenance.”
The term, widely used within the Chinese Communist Party, refers to a broad system of monitoring and control designed to prevent dissent and suppress organized opposition.
Lu described how that system is applied at the individual level. One woman in his neighborhood, he said, had a camera installed at the entrance to her sixth-floor apartment, with additional devices at street level and near the stairwell.
“Anyone classified as a stability target ends up with more than just one or two cameras outside their door,” he said.
The infrastructure behind these accounts is organized through two overlapping national programs.
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In cities, the network is known as “Skynet,” linking cameras across roads, residential compounds, and public areas into centralized police databases. In rural areas, the parallel “Sharp Eyes” program extends similar coverage to villages and townships, connecting local video systems into the same broader architecture. Together, the two projects were designed to ensure that no populated area remains outside the system’s reach. Current estimates put the total number of surveillance cameras in mainland China at more than 700 million.
Public reaction to the ranking was swift, though much of it was later removed.
Some comments focused on the mismatch between the system’s scale and its perceived usefulness. Others framed it as a political tool. One widely circulated remark described the network as a system designed to ensure that “ordinary people cannot disappear, no matter where they go,” while questioning why missing children are so rarely found through it.
Another commenter described the expansion of surveillance as evidence of a deeper lack of trust, arguing that the scale of monitoring reflects how the authorities view their own population.
More pointed criticism went further, linking the system to broader patterns of censorship, information control, and coercion, including account suspensions, content deletion, and intimidation. In these accounts, the camera network appears not as a neutral public safety tool, but as part of a larger system of control that extends from the physical world into the digital sphere.
By Li Muzi
