CHINA-INTERNAL: SOCIAL STABILITY/19TH PARTY CONGRESS
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The People's Daily reported on September 21, 2017 that while addressing a press conference in Beijing on September 20, Meng Jianzhu, head of China's top Party body overseeing security, the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs, said "The homicide rate in China in 2016 was 0.62 per 100,000 residents, better than most countries in the world." He added that there had been a 43 percent decline in severe violent crimes and a 56 percent slip in major and fatal road traffic accidents last year, compared with 2012. He claimed that people's satisfaction in public security rose from 87.55 percent in 2012 to 91.99 percent in 2016 and said it takes a lot of effort to keep the crime rate down in such a huge country with such a big population. Observing that economic crimes are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. with many of the crimes, such as commercial fraud, pyramid schemes, and invasion of privacy, being committed over the Internet thus posing new challenges to social governance, Meng Jianzhu urged the country's public security departments to innovate and upgrade their ways of working, so as to guarantee public security in a more comprehensive and coordinated manner. He called for renewed efforts to integrate all the footage from surveillance cameras around the country. He also pledged to use AI through machine learning, data mining and computer modelling to help stamp out risks to stability. The official newspaper 'The Paper' reported him saying that “Artificial intelligence can complete tasks with a precision and speed unmatchable by humans, and will drastically improve the predictability, accuracy and efficiency of social management.”
(Comment: The State Council separately unveiled a national artificial intelligence development plan in July, with the aim to raise the value of its core AI industries to 150 billion yuan (US$22.8 billion) by 2020 and 400 billion yuan by 2025. The blueprint explicitly lays out AI’s role in helping to manage public security, such as developing products that can analyse video footage and identify suspects from the biometrics of their faces and bodies. Some technologies, such as facial recognition, have already been put into use, albeit for detecting the perpetrators of only minor crimes. Mainland Chinese media reported this week that traffic police in Shanghai were now using facial recognition technology to identify cyclists and pedestrians caught on surveillance cameras violating traffic regulations. The government has also directed one of the country’s largest state-run defence contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on citizens’ jobs, hobbies, consumption habits and other behaviour to help predict terrorist acts before they occur. Wu Manqing, the Chief Engineer for the China Electronics Technology Group, was quoted by South China Morning Post as saying.“It’s crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror, but what is more important is to predict upcoming activities.”)
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