Thousands of CCTVs. Facial recognition on every corner. A surveillance network so dense it can track a jaywalker in seconds.
Yet somehow… children still go missing.
If a system this all-seeing still “fails,” what exactly is it seeing — and what is it choosing not to see?
People who say “China is one of the safest countries in the world” are usually the ones who walk through society as guests, not locals — Western expats treated like a quiet upper caste.
But safety is not measured by how the privileged feel.
It’s measured by how anxious parents behave.
And in China, look at the schools:
crowds of parents and grandparents standing guard at the gates every single day.
If the surveillance state is truly that safe, why does every school dismissal look like a mini-evacuation drill?
When a country builds a panopticon yet ordinary families still don’t trust it…
the question writes itself —
is the danger outside, or inside the system?