But as travel in China becomes more convenient, it is also becoming more intrusive. As Kristy Needham reports in the Sydney Morning Herald, railway stations in Beijing and other major cities this year are rolling out new, more sophisticated surveillance systems featuring cameras capable of capturing faces for inclusion in vast government databases to be mined by artificial intelligence algorithms. As Needham observes: “The high-speed rail network that so many Chinese rely on to travel long distances for business or holidays has become the fulcrum of the Chinese state’s experiment in harnessing digital technology to not only watch its citizens, but also to shape their behavior.”

On the train from Beijing to Shanghai, passengers are warned via public announcement to behave lest rule-breaking damage their “personal credit” score. Needham reports that, by late last year, more than 5 million people had been put on government blacklists banning them from buying high-speed rail tickets while 17 million were stopped from buying air tickets.

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