Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across
Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with
powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued
to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen's name and address
but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity,
police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number.
Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement
of China's controversial "one child" policy. Plans are being studied
to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases
charged to the card.

Security experts describe China's plans as the world's largest effort
to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the
activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the
technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply
technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to
150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired
permanent residency.



Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing
better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the
nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they
could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight
controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when
street protests are becoming more common.

"If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they
cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government
to control the population in the future," said Michael Lin, the vice
president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology,
the company providing the technology. Incorporated in Florida, China
Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology
from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle
China Fund. Three investment banks--Roth Capital Partners in Newport
Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia
Finance Group of Hong Kong--helped raise the money.

Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the
first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also
taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement
surveillance cameras--a tactic that would have drawn international
criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to
surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in
Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp
poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition
software as well.

New York police announced last month that they would install more than
100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by
the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain
financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in
the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether
face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without
the risk of false arrests.

Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit
television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and
the police will have the right to link them on request into the same
system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public
Security.

Some civil rights activists contend that the cameras in China and
Britain are a violation of the right of privacy contained in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than
surveillance in Britain, they said when told of Shenzhen's plans. "I
don't think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it's
quite controversial," said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of
Human Rights Watch in New York. China has fewer limits on police
power, fewer restrictions on how government agencies use the
information they gather and fewer legal protections for those
suspected of crime, she noted.

While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of
information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much
further in putting personal information on identity cards, PoKempner
added.

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