In a country with a population of about 1.4B "China has been building what it calls ''the world''s biggest camera surveillance network.'' Across the country, 170 million CCTV cameras are already in place and an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed in the next three years. Many of the cameras are fitted with artificial intelligence, including facial recognition technology." "On the night of April 7, nearly 60,000 people — or roughly 1 percent of the city''s population — had gathered at the Nanchang International Sports Center for a concert by Cantopop legend Jacky Cheung. More than 45 million of them live in Jiangxi province in southeast China, and 5 million of those people are concentrated in Nanchang, the province''s capital. Who could ever locate a single person in such a crowd?"
''And so it was there, amid the sea of faces in a packed stadium, with everyone''s attention presumably turned to the stage, that the fugitive assumed he was safe from authorities. But in the middle of an upbeat electronic song about summer romance, a pair of police officers began descending the aisles, according to footage posted on the Chinese video sharing site Miaopai. Soon, they had arrived at the row they were looking for and apprehended the 31-year-old."
Highly advanced facial recognition technology.
At the back end, these efforts merge with a vast database of information on every citizen, a “Police Cloud” that aims to scoop up such data as criminal and medical records, travel bookings, online purchase and even social media comments — and link it to everyone’s identity card and face.
"He couldn''t fathom that police could so quickly capture him in a crowd of 60,000.”