SPECIAL REPORT: Inside China's surveillance state

The Chinese Communist Party is crafting a nightmare surveillance state – flooding the country with an ocean of surveillance cameras which now invade the homes of minorities.

By 2020 China will be home to an estimated 626 million, a 3100 per cent increase in just three years.

“Based on the country’s current population of 1.4 billion people, that would mean nearly one camera for every two people,” Comparitech said of its study.

“Although this projection might seem vast, it may be a fraction of the actual number.

“When combined with the country’s advances in facial recognition technology, the privacy situation for its citizens is worrisome.”

The latest victims are members of the members of the Tujia and Miao tribes in China’s south-west province of Guizhou where a facial-recognition program called the Tongren City Security Facial Recognition System for Building Controls has been installed in residential buildings.

Robert Potter, a former cybersecurity contractor who worked with Chinese activists to release a database of this intrusive surveillance, said every one of the 110,000 profiles in the system had their privacy breached.

Chinese citizens might not know it yet, but the government is expanding intrusive surveillance across the country from public areas, like streets and inside trains, into people’s homes - threatening the privacy and freedom of an entire country.

“This is an extension of that same technology to control people’s entry and exit to their homes,” he told Sky news.

“It also has direct application on the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to enforce norms in people’s private spaces.”

Fulbright University's Christopher Balding said “this seems to imply that Beijing is essentially extending its Xinjiang-level crackdown and control to minorities, to religious groups, to basically anything that is a threat to the CCP.”

“It’s pretty much all religions that aren’t Chinese Buddhist, and fundamentally it’s about individuals that they would deem that would be less than loyal to the Chinese Communist Party.”

This surveillance transformation threatens the freedom of all of China, and if it’s left unchecked its oppressive wares could spread across the world – a concern University of Texas Associate Professor Sheena Greitens has shone a light on.

“My recent research has shown that China has exported surveillance technology platforms to over 80 countries worldwide,” she said.