There has always been a touch of the surreal about China’s facial recognition industry with the eye-popping sums raised by young startups and the extravagant claims of accuracy by a regime unconcerned over invasion of privacy. As we have noted before, when it comes to accuracy as well as scale the reality does not quite match the claims, but it suits the government to portray its systems as better than they are. It could even be argued that the perception of ubiquitous 24×7 surveillance will itself meet the objective of cutting street crime to the bone and there is some evidence that has been achieved. What is beyond doubt is that the great Chinese CCTV deployment combined with the absence…