Theatergoers have become the target of surveillance across China. A netizen recently revealed that authorities can spot every face and every movement clearly, even in the dark, over one thousand miles away through facial recognition and surveillance technologies.
On March 7, a netizen, whose name is “wandering monk Hou,” published an article titled “Two thousand kilometers away, I am staring at you quietly,” in which he shared his own personal experience. Inside a control room of a theater chain, he saw the interior of a cinema in Shenzhen that was located 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) away. This theater chain, which was not identified in the article, has 457 cinemas in 65 cities and across 26 provinces. All 457 cinemas play the same movie simultaneously from the central control room.
