Police in Guangdong Province have installed TV cameras on Foshan city's Liaoyuan Lu in an effort to control rampant prostitution in the area.
The cameras will enable the police to keep the street under 24-hour surveillance but their action has raised concerns about civil liberties.
According to the Guangzhou Daily, Liaoyuan Lu is notorious for its dim lights and network of back streets running off it, with prostitutes - sometimes in their hundreds - lining the 200-metre street.
The prostitution is also said to encourage fighting, drug taking and robbery in the area.
To eliminate the problem, local police set up a system of eight closed-circuit TV monitors on September 9 to help them respond quickly when any trouble is seen occurring on the street.
But the China Youth Daily said that further consideration should be given to solving the problem. The 24-hour surveillance not only targets prostitutes but also all other passers-bys.
The problem here is whether the police force have obtained the proper authorization to monitor innocent people. If they haven't, their action raises questions about human rights violations.
A technical problem also arises: what the Foshan police do with the video recordings produced by the cameras. To use them to crack down on prostitution is certainly legal, but when they touch upon matters of personal intimacy, what will the police do?
(Shanghai Star September 19, 2002)
