China’s Qing Ming festival — the tomb-sweeping holiday or, literally, “pure brightness” in English — is a time of renewal and reflection. The 2,500-year-old rite of passage marks the coming of spring and allows Chinese citizens of many East Asian countries to pay sober homage to ancestors by cleaning their resting places. Other serene activities, like kite-flying, are also allowed.
But some celebrants are being accused of violating sanctity of the holiday, held this year on April 5.
Many Beijing park-goers were seen climbing peach trees and generally being harmful to wildlife: picking blooming flowers, fishing in public lakes and being destructive to plants, according to Chinese state media and CNN. (The capital city saw an influx of 1.9 million visitors, up from 1.2 million last year, in part because most of the country has time off from work for the national holiday.)
Their behavior was so egregious that park management is considering creating a blacklist of visitors they deem “uncivilized.” Under their proposed scheme, surveillance and facial-recognition technology would be used to monitor guests and record infractions. Transgressors would be punished with limited access to the city’s parks and restricted ticket purchases for their attractions.
Chinese officials have already deployed such high-tech measures to police citizens.
In 2017, to prevent the theft of toilet paper, face scanners were installed in the bathrooms at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven Park. Visitors had to make eye contact with the machines to receive their small allotments of paper — they also had to wait 9 minutes before more would be dispensed.
Surveillance of public spaces is also being ramped up via robots who use facial-recognition software to scan crowds for persons of interest, monitor behavior and answer questions from visitors. In Tiananmen Square, the robots also wield stun guns, used if necessary at the command of a police officer off-site.
The gathered data and potential blacklists will eventually also be incorporated into the “social scorecard” system the Chinese government plans to introduce, under which citizens earn or lose points based on behavior. It’s being likened to a personal credit score, which can fluctuate up and down. Infractions would include, for example, smoking in non-smoking zones and posting fake news online. The system — which has been called “dystopian” by the Human Rights Watch — is expected to go into effect countrywide in 2020.